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Chapter Text

Aziraphale and the Serpent, unseen, stayed behind as three strong men rolled a stone across the door, lest wild beasts or wicked men disturb the body before the Sabbath passed and the women could return to prepare it for its final rest. “I cannot do this anymore,” sobbed the Angel. “For my heart fails me.” But the Serpent wrapped the Angel closely in his coils and hissed: “Shh, shh, leave the curssing of thiss crime to me; that iss my right, as it iss your right to weep, and your heart shall not fail.”

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. A.Z. Fell, Oxford University Press, 1939

“The first people who spotted it thought somebody’d dropped a guy,” said the constable on duty. “It wasn’t until the bargemen started coming through with a bit of light that anybody realized it was a body, and it’s not like you can run a telephone line to a barge, so it was half an hour after that the police were notified. It was trying to come off, and we’d have lost him completely, if those boys with the dinghy hadn’t gone to brace him, before we even knew he was there.”

“And no fault of yours, if you had,” Sergeant Frank Abbot assured him, feeling a bit out of place assuring someone so much solider and more policemanlike than he was, but doing his best to convey that the assurances merely flowed through him, from the more authoritative source of Inspector Lamb and the Yard. He was afraid that he only sounded pompous, and completely unaware that he sounded cocksure and sarcastic. “We were lucky such public spirited lads were here to act so quickly. And you and your men have managed to keep traffic flowing well enough. Where will they be bringing it to shore?”

The constable directing him to the foot of the bridge, whence there would be no hope of bringing the body up without it being snapped by the newspapermen beginning to circle the area, vulturelike, Abbot picked his way down, mindful of his shoes and feeling, not precisely put-upon, but unfortunate. He’d been getting dressed when he’d gotten the call - he came in by Westminister Bridge anyway, got a body there, be a good chap and take it in on your way, save us some steps? An “us” that patently did not include him, but that was the fate of youth, after all, and no doubt when he was a bit more senior he’d be happy enough to inconvenience his future counterparts; but the fact was he’d been out late at a firework party and had needed more time over his coffee cups, which this inconsiderate corpse was denying him. And there won’t be anything in it for the Yard anyway, he thought, arriving as the boat tied up. The body lay in the bottom with a tarp over it, making less of a mound than he’d expected. Not been long in the water, then; all to the good. “What have we got here, then?” He asked. “Suicide?”

“Not a hope,” said the policeman tying up the boat. “Take a look for yourself. Oi, up there, you lot, make way for the gurney! How’s a fellow to do his job for tripping over you!” This last directed to the reporters, who were distinctly in the way of the ambulance crew.

A second constable lifted the corner of the tarp, keeping his body between it and the flashbulbs, though at this angle and distance they wouldn’t have gotten much anyway. The corpse lay face down in the bottom, his short leather motoring jacket not nearly sopping wet enough to have been properly submerged, but sufficiently damp that the blood on the shoulders and collar still appeared bright red and sloppy. The constable lifted the tarp a bit further, to reveal dark curly hair clustering thickly around the red hole at the base of the skull. Frank swore softly.

“You’ve got that right,” said the constable, lowering the tarp again. “Bullet went straight through, so not much of his face left above his mouth. Must be one of those Bohemian types - his beard is still whole. Pure dumb luck he got caught on the buttress instead of going into the river properly.”

Frank swore again. “Which buttress was it?” Up the steps he went again, to confer with the constable and arrange for the area from which the body had been dumped, if not actually murdered, to be cleared for inspection - for all the good that would do after gawkers had trampled all over the sidewalk and leaned against the railing doing heaven knows what to any evidence.

By the time he got out of the call box after arranging for the crime scene unit to come out, and taken his orders from Inspector Lamb, the body had been loaded onto the ambulance amid much flashing of bulbs, and he loaded himself into it too, ignoring all the questions shouted after him. “No, I can’t tell you the time of death before I’ve even gotten him to the exam room,” said the doctor in attendance, when the doors were safely shut and the vehicle underway. “Nor am I such a fool as to commit myself to cause, though likely you’ll think it looks plain enough and likely you’ll be right.”

“I wouldn’t dream of asking you to draw conclusions before your examination,” said Frank soothingly. “I just want something to get on with. Time is of the essence and all that. All right if I turn out his pockets? Whoever did him in would be a fool not to take anything that would identify him, but sometimes people are fools and they might have missed something.”

“Go ahead. You’re not going to affect anything important after a night hanging off the buttress.”

“You think he went in last night, then?” Frank began respectfully, but systematically, going through the pockets.

“Until I find something to show otherwise. It’s consistent with the state of rigor and if you’re going to kill somebody with a gun, Guy Fawkes is the night to do it, all those fireworks going off. Stands to reason he went off the bridge after dark, in any case; maybe even during the fireworks display, when anybody who chanced to look down from the sky would be dazzled. Good lord, is that notecase full?”

Frank ruffled through the damp bills as best he could. “Almost ten pounds full, yes, and I’ll tell you something else. This is an old case, but it’s a good one. All his clothes are. If he’s a bohemian type, as per the beard, he’s one who comes from money.”

The doctor shook his head sadly. “Fell in with bad company.”

“Or played too high in the markets and ten pounds is the last of his fortune. This address book’ll need to dry a bit before we can mine it, if the ink hasn’t run, but - aha, we are in luck! Perfectly legible motorbike registration made out to - well, almost perfectly - R or maybe H Joshua Fell, at an address in Soho. That gives us a place to start, anyhow.”

And start there they did, he and Inspector Lamb finding the address without difficulty. Soho on a weekday morning was a very different place from the Soho of restaurants and theaters Frank was used to, relatively quiet with most of the residents either safely at work, or safely returned from it and settling down for a day’s sleep, and most of the businesses shuttered until a more profitable time of opening. “This can’t be the right place,” said Frank, rhetorically. “Who lives in a bookshop?”

“Who runs a bookshop in Soho, for that matter?” Inspector Lamb retorted. “But there’s the sign - A.Z. Fell and Co. And for a clincher, there’s the motorbike, obstructing the footpath for long enough to get a ticket.”

The bookshop, like the clothes, had seen better days but was bearing up bravely. It would have been a good site for some livelier trade, perhaps a restaurant or tobacconist’s, on a corner with expanses of leaded glass giving onto both streets, neighbor to a print shop on one street and a baker’s on the other, its back toward a smallish theater across a narrow courtyard, with plenty of modest flats ranging from well-kept to rundown above the businesses on all hands. No light shone within or above the bookshop itself, and the blinds were drawn. Frank tried the door, rang the bell, and inspected the posted hours beside the “closed” sign, which had - in common with the posted hours of many another bookshop of this kind that he had attempted to patronize - the virtue of neatness and the vice of complete incomprehensibility.

“Motorbike seems to be pretty well-kept,” said Inspector Lamb - a big man and a solid one, whose presence radiated “policeman” in a way which the slender, flaxen-haired Sergeant Abbot could never hope to achieve. “Not that I know anything much about them. The PC on the beat last night ticketed it at 10:17 P.M. We’ll have to get it dusted, on the chance that the murderer drove it back here after doing the deed, though with it obstructing the path like that I don’t like our chances of finding anythingthat’s any good to us. As for the shop, let’s look around a bit, see if there’s a back or side entrance that shows signs of life.”

No new entrances appeared, but signs of life they found in the person of a grizzled old man in a dirty macintosh, clearing the remains of what must have been a dangerously merry bonfire in the court between the bookshop and the theater, overlooked by a number of windows, all boasting gay curtains and a relative absence of grime.  “I say, sir,” Frank accosted the man, “what can you tell us about the residents and owners of this bookshop?”

The old man paused the erratic motions of his broom, glared first at Frank, then at Lamb, from under the brim of his disreputable cap, spat the last quarter inch of a cigarette into the ashes, and said, in an accent which, while not recognizably Scots, was not definitively anything else, either: “Not a damn thing.”

“Can you tell us who owns the building, then?”

“Not me, so’s nae business of mine.” He pulled a pack of rolling papers out of one macintosh pocket, a wad of tobacco out of another, and began to roll a new cigarette.

“Do you live around here?”

“So what if I do? S’nae crime, is it?”

“No, sir, it’s not, but crime has been done. We’re policemen. A man who lived here met with foul play last night and we’re in the middle of an investigation.”

“Foul play?” Beneath the layer of stubble and grime, the man turned pale. “Who’s been playing foul with Mr Fell?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out. So you do know the residents here?”

He backed away, shaking his head. “Not a thing,” he said. “Not a word.” He dropped the broom and sprinted, with surprising speed, for a small door squeezed in next to the door of the printer’s, which presumably led to the flats above, and vanished, the sound of his pounding feet indicating that he was running pell-mell up a set of sturdy, but uncarpeted, stairs. He was also yelling something, but it sounded more like “Jezebel” than anything else, which couldn’t be the case.

“Should I follow him?” Frank asked.

“Keep an eye on the door. He knew nothing about it himself, but he’s gone for advice, and we’ll see who comes back with him.”

They did not have long to wait before the door to the flats opened again to admit onto the street a small wizened woman, her head wrapped in a scarf over curlers and her elfin body in a sateen kimono of an astonishing pink color, embroidered with frayed dragons and birds in even more astonishing colors. Her purple mules minced over the pavement more quickly than seemed probable, till she stood at the foot of the steps with her arms crossed, peering up at them appraisingly. “Excuse me,” she said, in a voice a little too precise to be entirely natural, “are you gentlemen the ones who upset Sergeant Shadwell?”

“I’m afraid we are, ma’am,” said Frank. “We didn’t mean to, but we’re on rather upsetting business. Are you acquainted with the residents here?”

“I could ask the same of you.”

Frank produced his identification, and she leaned forward and tilted her head, for all the world like one of the sparrows flying back and forth from the street, to inspect both his and the Inspector’s badges with a frown. “Did he call you?”

“He can’t call anybody,” said the Inspector. “He’s dead. Murdered.”

He said this to elicit a reaction, and he succeeded, though not perhaps in the way he’d expected. The woman’s eyes flew open wide, but her expression was not so much of shock as of flat disbelief. “Nonsense! Nobody’d kill Mr Fell!”

“And yet, they did,” said Lamb, bearing down hard and, Frank couldn’t help feeling, a bit cruelly; but kindness was not always the lot of policemen. “Dumped off of Westminster Bridge. You’ll no doubt read all about it in the afternoon papers. Nothing left of his face but the beard.”

“Mr Fell doesn’t have a - oh!” Disbelief gave way to comprehension, and then to horror. “Oh! You don’t mean Mr Fell, you mean - the Lamb? Somebody killed the Lamb?”

“A corpse dumped in the vicinity of Westminster Bridge was carrying a motorbike registration for a Mr R or H Joshua Fell at this address,” said Frank, stepping in to cover the Inspector’s momentary discomfiture at hearing his own name in this context. “Who did you think we meant?”

The old woman wrapped herself in her own arms and shivered - not surprisingly, for the morning was chill and the kimono could not have been particularly warm. “That’s his baby brother,” she said. “Not Mr Fell at all. He’ll be ever so upset, but you won’t find him here, not till this afternoon at earliest and maybe not till tomorrow.”

“Oh? Where is he?” Inspector Lamb asked. 

“No idea.” The woman visibly pulled herself together. “He was in the War, you see, and he doesn’t like the fireworks, so he just - isn’t here for the Fifth of November. The Lamb must have put this down as a, what do you call it, an address of convenience when he registered the bike. He goes abroad a lot.’

“Has he any other relations in town?”

“They have other relations. Whether they’re in town or not I couldn’t say, but I daresay they’ll have some servant or other can put you in touch if they’re not. They’ll be in the directory. Mr Gabriel Fell, I think lives in Kensington, and the sister they call Mickey, which must be short for something, but I couldn’t tell you what, or her married name, if you put a gun to my head, nor we wouldn’t know if we passed each other on the street.”

Frank dug the scant nuggets of information out of this dense verbal matrix and wrote them down. “Right, and your name, ma’am?”

“Marjorie Potts, dearie, J-O-R-I-E and with two T’s. I’m not ashamed of it.” Her color was looking better now. “Their father’s up north somewhere, in an Abbey, but he’s poorly and you’d do better to talk to the brother or sister if you can. But if they’re not in town they’ll be up north, I expect.”

“Gabriel Fell, in Kensington,” said Inspector Lamb.

“Yes. That part of the family’s ever so posh. Oh, that poor dear boy! And poor Mr Fell!” 

They left Mrs Potts dabbing her eyes, to locate the nearest callbox, where the Inspector asked for an address to be looked up, and for a discreet watch to be kept on the shop, with notice made of any comings and goings. He listened for some time, long after he finished taking down the address, and hung up with a wry smile on his face. “Not the first time they’ve had an eye on that street,” he said complacently. “They knew Mrs Potts when I mentioned her, by that name and another. What did you think of those flats above the printer’s?”

“Nice and neat. If my sister wanted to play at being Bohemian, she could choose a worse place than that to do it in.”

“Oh, now, there’s where your wrong! That’s a disorderly house, that is, and Mrs Potts is known on the streets as Madam Tracy. Not but what it isn’t a fairly orderly disorderly house, as such places go, calls by appointment and so forth. And right next door is a bookshop with one brother in Kensington and one in the Thames, and himself nowhere to be found.”

“They won’t be any too pleased to see us in Kensington if we’re dragging the family’s black sheep into the light of day,” said Frank.

“Nobody’s ever pleased to see us, and that’s the sad truth. But murder will out and spare nobody’s feelings, so it’s Kensington for us. Your sort of folks, they’ll be, so I hope you can make yourself useful.”

Frank drove, reviewing Mrs Potts’s conversation in his mind, hoping to make himself useful without seeming overeager. This was his first real investigation, under Lamb, and the man seemed skeptical of him and his public school background, which rather put his back up, but it didn’t do to show it. “So nobody’d kill Mr Fell. But who would kill the Lamb? Not quite the same idea, is it?”

“It might only be the difference between the one she knows, and the one she’s met.”

“You’d have to know someone fairly well to call them The Lamb, begging your pardon.”

“Not if that’s what his brother calls him. An older brother can outgrow a nickname, but the youngest never will.”

“I suppose. Why would nobody kill Mr Fell, I wonder? She believed that, at least in that moment. Didn’t even pause to reject the idea - just, he can’t be murdered, nobody would kill him. Like I might say, the Inspector can’t be inside a chocolate box.”

“I can’t imagine a circumstance in which you’d be called to say any such thing. Nobody did kill that Mr Fell, so happen she’s right.”

“Nobody killed that Mr Fell, that we know of. We don’t know where he is.”

“No more we do. Fleeing the fireworks - or fleeing the country for fratricide - or going out with the tide like his brother was supposed to? We’ll find out. It’s what we’re for.”

The address in North Kensington was clearly striving mightily to keep up with its neighbors. The door was answered by a footman rather than a housemaid, who first insisted frostily that no one was at home, but upon seeing badges and being informed that the police were anxious to communicate with the family of R (or H) Joshua Fell, thawed sufficiently to explain that the only Fells presently in residence were closeted with their governess, and that Mr and Mrs Fell had attended the annual Firework Masquerade at Mrs Hostmassif’s home, after which, as was their custom, they had remained there to sleep, Mrs Hostmassif being Mr Gabriel Fell’s sister and the two households being accustomed to accommodating each other in these ways. This address having been obtained, and the footman’s pious hope that Mr Joshua Fell’s difficulties would be swiftly resolved having been deflected by the wall of police discretion, Frank proceeded to Richmond, where the house they wanted succeeded better at keeping up without appearing to try so hard.

They found themselves expected, for the footman had immediately telephoned to warn his counterpart in the other home. A starched and stately housemaid showed them to a small drawing room done up primarily in white and cream, full of streamlined furniture and smelling only slightly of tobacco and alcohol. Though there was no fire in the grate, the room was moderately warm, the house being equipped with steam heat. Soon they were joined by a yawning, strikingly beautiful young woman whose stylish morning frock of white merino set off her dark brown skin as if daring anyone to comment upon it, who introduced herself as Uriel Ligur, Mrs Hostmassif’s personal secretary, and begged their indulgence while her mistress and her mistress’s brother prepared to come down. “The party last night didn’t break up until past three,” she explained, in an accent as refined as Frank’s own,“and we are all at sixes and sevens this morning.” As if to emphasize the family’s disarray, she moved a cushion an eighth of an inch before gesturing them to take a seat. “Please make yourselves comfortable. I hope your business is not too serious?”

“Very serious indeed, I’m afraid, Miss Ligur,” said Inspector Lamb, taking her at her word and appropriating the most comfortable-looking of the chairs, apparently oblivious to the fact that he looked as out of place as a whale in an ice rink. Frank took a sleeker, less comfortable chair to his right, and settled in at once, feeling more like an awkward visitor than like a policeman. “Are you acquainted with your mistress’s youngest brother, Mr H or R Joshua Fell?” Lamb asked.

Miss Ligur’s eyebrows went up. “I don’t suppose I’ve exchanged more than a dozen word with him over the telephone. Why do you put his name like that - H or R?”

“He has not been capable of communicating with us, and the ink on his motorcycle registration was rather blurred, so that the first initial is difficult to make out. Can you tell us which it is supposed to be?”

They were interrupted at this juncture by the advent of refreshments, which someone apparently considered necessary even for a visit from the police.  Frank was pleased to see they included an angular coffee pot and an assortment of pastries as well as the teapot. Miss Ligur saw to their serving herself and dismissed the maid before responding to the question. “His full name is Raziel Joshua Fell, but he prefers his middle name.”

“Raziel?” Inspector Lamb made no attempt to hide his surprise. “I see why he went by Joshua. It’s an unusual name, too, but at least it sounds like a name.”

“Raziel’s vaguely familiar,” said Frank Abbot. “Isn’t it - that’s an angel of some sort?”

Miss Ligur favored him with a cool and gracious smile. “An angel of knowledge, yes sir, chiefly known through an apocryphal book of the Bible. Naming children after angels is a tradition in the Fell family.”

“I see,” said Frank. “Is it a quaint coincidence that she has hired a secretary also named for an angel? Or are you a family connection?” He gave her his most winning smile.

Miss Ligur sipped her tea, declining to be won. “My parents were from highly religious families. I believe my mother was fed up with having to distinguish among all the Marys, Elizabeths, and Annes on both sides, and determined to name me according to theme, yet so distinctly as to forbid confusion. I have always felt fortunate not to be named Hepzibah.”

At this juncture, they were joined by two men and a woman, all well-dressed but bearing the signs around their eyes and mouths of a late night and an abrupt awakening. “Good morning,” said the woman, in the brisk, no-nonsense tones suitable to the lady of the house addressing tradesmen. “So sorry to have kept you waiting. I’m Joshua’s sister, Michaela Hostmassif, and this is my brother, Gabriel, and our cousin Sandalphon, who is also our solicitor.”

Mrs Hostmassif was a tall, imposing woman of middle years and erect posture, emphasized by her style of dress and by the smooth upsweep of her brown hair. Mr Gabriel Fell was a dark-haired, square-jawed man like the hero of an adventure serial, with eyes of a startling violet color, who seemed to tower even over the Inspector. Standing behind both, Sandalphon Fell appeared, by contrast, both short and squat, more the type of a prizefighter than a solicitor, and his eyes looked bruised from lack of sleep , though his dress was, if anything, a shade too impeccable for the hour of the day. Hungover, Frank thought, and absolutely delighted to be hauled out of bed at this hour, but not about to let the side down. They’ve assumed defensive positions. 

Gabriel Fell accepted a cup of coffee from Miss Ligur and seated himself in the center of the sofa, with Mrs Hostmassif taking her place on his right and Sandalphon on his left. “So, what’s the trouble?” His voice fairly boomed, with a surprising trace of American accent, and his face assumed a concerned look that Frank could easily believe he practiced in the mirror. “Is the Lamb in trouble? Joshua, I mean - we’ve always called him the Lamb. He’s a little wild but I hope you’ll believe me that there’s no harm in him.”

“I hope I will, too,” said Inspector Lamb. “When did you last see your brother?”

“Yesterday afternoon,” said Gabriel, promptly. “It must have been, oh, four o’clock, was it, Sandy?”

“Yes.” Sandalphon’s voice was low and careful; very much a solicitor’s voice. “He wouldn’t stay to tea. Nothing would do but he had to go tearing back to London on his motorbike.”

“Back to London? Where were you?”

The question was directed at Sandalphon, but Gabriel answered. “Auldmon Abbey. Our place in Lancashire. Sandy and I had some business up there, and The L - Joshua’d run up for a visit. We were afraid we’d be late for the party - and so we were, we missed dinner - and he wouldn’t wait to motor down with us. What exactly has happened, Inspector? Is he - does he need an alibi? For what?”

Inspector Lamb shifted his attention to Mrs Hostmassif. “And you, ma’am? When did you see him?”

“Goodness, not for the last six months. He’s been abroad.”

“But you expected him at your party?”

“Not above half. I sent him an invitation when I heard he’d returned to town, but it would depend on his mood whether he showed up or not, even if he hadn’t driven to Lancashire and back during the day. What exactly is wrong, Inspector? You’re frightening me.” She didn’t sound frightened; more impatient. Possibly Sandalphon wasn’t the only one in the room with a hangover.

“The matter’s grave enough.,” said Inspector Lamb, locking eyes with Gabriel and leaving it to Frank to observe the reactions of the others. “I’m afraid a body was pulled from the Thames this morning, with a motorcycle registration for R. Joshua Fell on it, and we need someone to come in and view the body, to confirm that it’s actually him.”

“What?” Mrs Hostmassif gasped, and Miss Ligur, standing unobtrusively behind her, laid both hands gently on her shoulders. “But that’s - no! No, I don’t believe it! He was robbed, or - no!”

Sandalphon Fell remained silent, though his eyelids twitched and he laid a hand on Gabriel’s arm. Gabriel’s face seemed momentarily frozen. He swallowed. “Oh. Oh, I see.”

The two policemen waited.

“This is - well. This is completely unexpected, and yet -“ The American element in his voice grew stronger, flattening out his words. “I always said - well, not always, just since he dropped out of Oxford and - I said he’d come to a bad end and a part of me has been braced for it, but I thought - he’d be beaten to death by Brownshirts in Berlin or knifed by an Apache in Paris or, or - he kept such bad company - but - er - drowning in the Thames? That’s so, so unlike him.”

“He didn’t drown,” said Lamb. Mrs Hostmassif made a strangled noise; Uriel stood like a statue, with downcast eyes; Gabriel and Sandalphon only stared. “It’s not a pretty sight, but we need a firm identification. It’s the only way to move forward. And if, as Mrs Hostmassif suggests, he was robbed by this man we’ve pulled out, the sooner you know that the sooner you can go looking for him.”

“We won’t have to look far. We have another brother - he owns a bookshop - Joshua’d go there if he were in trouble.”

“We’ve been to the bookshop already this morning,” said Frank. “No sign of anybody. Was this other brother at the party last night?”

“No, but he wouldn’t have been.” Mrs Hostmassif spoke with almost no inflection, staring past Frank’s head at something, apparently, a very long way off. “Sunshine never comes to parties and he won’t even stay in town on Bonfire Night. A friend of his has a place in the country somewhere that he runs off to. Can’t stand the fireworks, he says, all the bangs and the smell, puts him right back in the War, though if he’s going to be afraid of something it would make a lot more sense to fear the way his friend drives. I’ve tried to get him to stay and tough it out, prove to himself there’s no danger, but Sunshine - well, he won’t. Why am I talking about him? Gabriel, you need to go - go tell them it isn’t him -“

Miss Ligur put a teacup into her employer’s hand, and she drank deeply.

“I’ve seen dead bodies before,” said Sandalphon. “I can go.”

“No,” said Gabriel, shaking off his hand and standing up, straightening his jacket like one bracing himself to march into danger. “It’s my responsibility. I’ll go. You see if you can get hold of Crawly’s man, find out where it is he runs off to with Sunshine. I think Joshua’s been there a time or two. He might have gone with them this year.”

“Better give us the number and let us take care of that,” said Lamb, leveling his gaze at Sandalphon. 

“I don’t have the information on me, but it’s a Mayfair exchange, in the name of Anthony J Crowley, and the man’s name is Erich, I believe. Here’s my card in case you need any help with him.” Sandalphon’s mouth did something that might be intended as a smile. “I’m good at getting servants to talk.”

“Mickey, go back to bed. There’s nothing you can do.” Gabriel Fell drank off his coffee in one long pull, set the cup down, and squared his shoulders. “Let’s go. My car’s in the mews behind -”

“It would be better if you rode with us, sir,” said Frank. “I undertake to bring you back in a timely manner, and it’s an unmarked car. You needn’t fear what the neighbors think.”

This statement caused both Gabriel and Sandalphon to turn quietly stony gazes upon him. “Are you implying that you suspect my client will flee if allowed to use his own transportation?” Sandalphon’s solicitor’s voice got, if possible, even drier.

“Certainly not,” said Inspector Lamb. “But we can get through quite a lot of business in the car on the way.”

“And what business do you suppose -“

“Just go!” Mrs Hostmassif snapped. “You’re not in charge this time, Bolt! The police are! You have to do things their way, not yours, and the sooner you do the sooner you’ll fail to identify the corpse as Joshua and they can get on with things!”

Anger flickered over Gabriel’s face; then he composed his features into something less real but more socially acceptable and turned to his sister. “Okay, Mickey. You’re right. Okay? Miss Ligur, see she gets back to bed.”

“She doesn’t work for you,” snarled Mrs Hostmassif. “Good day, gentlemen.”

“Thank you for the tea,” said Inspector Lamb, and they withdrew in as good order as they could manage. 

“I apologize for my sister,” said Gabriel Fell, as they descended the front stairs to the car. “She’s normally solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, but of course your news is a shock on top of very little sleep.”

“Don’t fret about it, sir,” said Inspector Lamb genially. “These interviews are never easy, but they’re a walk in the park for us compared to the people receiving the news. Here we are, sir. Frank’ll be driver and we’ll sit in the back so we can talk easy-like.” They shut the doors and Frank started the car. “This Sunshine brother of yours, that doesn’t like the Fifth of November -“

“Yeah, Aziraphale.” Gabriel’s voice did not modulate itself for the small space of the car, so that Frank heard him easily over the engine. He sounded amused and indulgent. “Our poor little Sunshine.”

“I don’t remember an angel named Azifferel.”

Gabriel, incongruously, chuckled. “Azifferel, that’s a good one! A-Zir-A-Fail. It's from a book, lots of pretty pictures and fancy writing and so on, called The Book of the Angel Aziraphale. It’s what they call Apocrypha. Looks like part of the Bible, but isn’t.”

“Miss Ligur explained the family naming tradition to us. She said Joshua’s first name also came from Apocrypha.”

“Yeah, Sunshine and Joshua’s mother loved that book, and I guess after naming Aziraphale for one bogus Scripture it made sense, to her, to name the Lamb after another one. She was peculiar like that.”

“So she was your father’s second wife?”

“That’s right. Mickey and Raffles and I had our own mother, broke her neck hunting  when we were small.  And then our stepmother never quite recovered from having Joshua. Died two years later trying to have a sister, who also didn’t make it. After that the Old Man gave up on marrying. Just as well. He wasn’t young when he started.”

“So there’s five of you, in two sets?”

“Yes, only it’s four now. Raffles - Raphael - died in the influenza after the War. The Old Man’s back at the Abbey. Hasn’t set foot out of the house in years. Sandy’s father’s a doctor, looks after him. This’ll probably kill him - if it is Joshua. If it’s not he doesn’t need to know a thing about it. You said this body we’re off to see wasn’t drowned. What am I in for?”

“Shot. In the head. I’m afraid there’s not much face left to look at.”

Frank glanced up in the rear view in time to catch the grimace that crossed Fell’s face. “Well. If it’s him, I’ll manage. And if it’s not, so much the better.”

“Yes, let’s hope that both of your brothers are in the country, safe and sound.”

“Hm. I don’t know that being at Crawly’s place counts as ‘safe’ exactly, but it’s a lot better than being in the river.”

“Oh? “

“Yes, Inspector, oh. Not that I have accusations to make against my brother’s friend, only - he got the name ‘Crawly’ in school for a reason. Charity boy, always in trouble, but he got his hooks into Sunshine back then and he’s never let go. These days he’s a solicitor, does very well for himself - a little too well if you know what I mean - and makes my flesh creep, but I don’t know anything actually against him. You know the type. A little too flash to be respectable but nothing wrong that anybody can define. Joshua fairly worships Sunshine and Sunshine’s round Crawly’s finger and there’s nothing I can do about it. But this time, I hope they’ve all hared off together to whatever hole-in-the-wall it is that doesn’t have fireworks on Guy Fawkes’ Day.” 

“Well, we’ll know soon.”

“ Um. Look here, Inspector, I don’t want to leave you with the wrong impression of my little brothers. They were a bit spoiled, but at heart they’re both sound as bells. Joshua’s having a lot of trouble settling down and taking on his responsibilities for the family, but if we can get him married to the right sort he’ll be fine. Sunshine’s stubborn and a little too loyal to old school friends for his own good, but he manages our Soho properties well enough, even if that bookshop of his is a joke.”

“Your Soho properties? He doesn’t own the shop, then?”

“No, not yet. When the Old Man kicks off they’ll be his and Joshua’s but for now he has an allowance and an inheritance from his mother’s people, and we get the rents. I was afraid property management’d be too much for him, he’s so softhearted, but he does well enough with me making the big decisions for him. I’ve had to make him raise the rents twice since the Crash, and he’s never had any trouble with the tenants, never been so much as late with the payments.”

Mrs Potts’s disorderly house must be doing well in these hard times, thought Frank. Wonder if this fellow knows where his rents come from. “Here we are,” he said, pulling up to the morgue. “Shall I put the car away and meet you inside?”

“You do that, Frank, and on the way put your head in on the crime scene boys, see if they can say one way or another whether he was killed on the bridge or not, and ask if they’ve sent anybody to dust the bike yet.”

So Frank drove off, and Inspector Lamb took Gabriel Fell into the morgue, where the attendant greeted them and showed them to the room where the corpse waited under a sheet. “Now, sir, I’ll warn you, the head isn’t a pretty sight, and not much identifiable there, either. I know you probably think you’ve seen worse in the War, but there’s no telling how it’ll take people. Are there any distinguishing marks your brother had, that might spare you the ordeal of the face?”

“Yeah, actually,” said Gabriel, his eyes fixed on the odd shape of the sheet at the head of the table. “He was born with birthmarks on both hands and feet. Sunshine used to call them his stigmata.”

“Ah. Then I’m sorry.” The attendant twitched the sheet away from one hand, slender and passive on the metal table, palm up, fingers curled. In the center of the ashen palm was a livid mark, round and irregularly rayed, like a hole wicking blood along the lines of the hand.

Gabriel turned a bit green. “That’s, it’s not usually so -“

“In life it would have been less obvious because the skin would have been less pale.” The attendant covered the hand again. “The one on the other is harder to see because that hand trailed in the water and there’s a fair amount of lividity. Would you care to see the similar marks on the feet, or are you satisfied?”

“I’m - I’m satisfied.” Gabriel cleared his throat. “The, the wound. In the head. It - he wouldn’t have had time to feel anything, right? They say a head shot’s the quickest thing. He wouldn’t have suffered?”

“Not at all,” lied the morgue attendant smoothly, as he always lied to relatives making identifications. Those who died by violence suffered as they did it, but it did the living no good to dwell upon that. “We’ll need to do an autopsy, but the nature of the wound and the condition of the rest of the body is such that we don’t expect any surprises.”

“Come along out of here, sir,” said Inspector Lamb, taking his elbow. “A cup of tea and a sit-down’s what you need.”

Gabriel followed, swallowing and squaring his jaw. “What about his things?”

“They’ve been collected and are being examined for evidence. They’ll be returned to you as soon as we’re sure we’re done with them, but there’s some possibility of needing to show something at the inquest.” Or, eventually, a trial. It could be a long time, if ever, before the effects were returned.

“Inquest. Oh, God.”

By the time Lamb settled Gabriel in the office set aside for interviewing the bereaved, Abbot returned, already bearing tea. Good man, Abbot; young, but shaping up nicely, if one could keep his fancy education and tendency to over-cleverness in check. Lamb met him at the door to relieve him of the mug and ask, in a voice lower than the bereaved was likely to hear: “Well?”

“Crowley’s in the directory, all right, but there’s no answer at his flat and his office number will only say he’s not expected until tomorrow. The crime scene boys say there’s nothing to say one way or another about the bridge,” replied Abbot, in similar tones. “No expelled cartridge, but that was a faint hope, anyway, the way people’d been tramping all over the place. If it was ever there it’s even odds it’s been kicked half a mile down the gutter, or into the river. And no blood, but I’m afraid that’s no help either. I had a good look at the wound, and it seemed to me, if you pointed down to the river and said: ‘Look, there, a mermaid’ or something, to get somebody to lean over the rail and look down, you could put a bullet about where that bullet was put, and the blood’d land on you and in the water without necessarily splashing the rail.”

Mermaids! Were all public school types so fanciful? “The medical chappies’ll be able to tell us all about the blood. The corpse has Joshua’s birthmarks, so at least we’re not back at square one. Come along and take notes.”

They were prepared to wait until Gabriel had finished the mug of tea, but he pulled himself together after only a sip or two, sat up straighter, and asked: “So. What’s next?”

“Next, I’m afraid we’ll have to ask a lot of impertinent questions. It’s the only way to find out where we are, you see. Are you aware of anyone who wished your brother harm?”

Gabriel shook his head. “No one. Nobody could! At least, not anybody I ever met. Somebody could have robbed him, couldn’t they?”

“Gunshots in the back of the head are rare in robbery, and his notecase had almost ten pounds in it. Did he often carry that type of money?”

“I think so? He liked to pay cash for things. If we didn’t know where his money went we couldn’t lecture him about it.” He set down the tea with an air of resolution. “Look, Sandy may not like this, but it’s murder and nothing I can say can harm him now, so I’ll come clean with you. He was a good boy, himself, but he was naive and it got him into bad company.”

“Such as?”

“Nobody I ever met personally. But he was a sucker for a sob story and he made no distinctions. A beggar was as good as a lord, to him.”

“Soft touch, then?”

“I’ll say!” Again, that incongruous chuckle, followed by a sad headshake. “And not just beggars. Organizations. Causes. He’d go to, well, not to put too fine a point upon it he’d go to Communist meetings, had friends in the Party. I don’t think he ever joined. Wandered around Europe giving alms to one-legged soldiers, never mind what side they were on. Pacifist rallies, contributing to strike funds, things like that.”

“So he was political.”

“I wouldn’t say that. He was very tender toward the poor and downtrodden, which is good, of course. I give to charities myself. But he didn’t think much of most charities, said there was no use in Lord and Lady So-and-So providing prayerbooks for orphans when what orphans needed was a society that didn’t kill off their parents. Used to go out looking for what he called ‘the root of the problem.’”

Lamb could hear the quotation marks. Abbot’s pencil danced across the page of his notebook, setting down pothooks and scribbles that the girls in the typing room would reconstitute into words, but without the illuminating layers of gesture and tone. “You think he might have found someone at the root of a problem and they resented his interference?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe he realized someone was cheating him. Or disputed the Party line. He was a soft touch but he was also a lord’s son. People like that see people like us as their natural enemies.”

“Do you know the names of any organizations whose meetings he attended?”

“I never really paid attention. I was waiting for him to grow out of it, you know?”

“What about women?”

“That’s not the sort of thing he’d talk about with me. Lord knows I tried to introduce him to suitable girls often enough, but he’d either dodge them or put them off, talking about one of his hobbyhorses. You can’t land the right sort of girl by telling her that property is theft! I expect he had a girlfriend or three around Europe, of the sort he wouldn’t introduce to the rest of us. Sunshine’ll know. He might know some of the organizations, too. They were thick as thieves.”

“I see.” Inspector Lamb was growing mighty eager to talk to this“Sunshine,” but one thing at a time. “So, you’re not aware of any recent quarrels with anybody, for any cause?”

“No!” A bit too eager, that no. “He’s got a temper, but he wasn’t the sort of person you quarreled with. Once he disrupted a church fete, calling everybody hypocrites for worrying about altar cloths and backbiting each other when people were starving in the next town over, and it was all very public and embarrassing, but that’s not the kind of thing people shoot each other in the head over, is it?”

“You’d be surprised,” Lamb assured him. “But by and large, you’re right. Can you think of anybody who might have benefited from your brother’s death?”

“Benefited?” Gabriel barked a laugh, than frowned. “The motorbike may be the only thing he owns, apart from what he stood up in.”

“What about family properties, invested capital, that sort of thing?”

“You’ll have to talk to Sandy about all that. He’ll have it at his fingers ends. I know he sat Joshua down and made him write a will before he left for Europe the first time, but I think that was  ‘Everything of which I die possessed to my favorite brother Aziraphale.’ “ He grimaced. “I suppose that means Sunshine owns a motorbike now. As if this needed to be any more like some bizarre dream! I think I’d like to wake up. Are we almost done?”

“Almost, and then we’ll take you home and bother Sandy for awhile,” Lamb assured him. “Can you think of any reason why Joshua might have been on Westminster Bridge?”

Gabriel started. “Westminster Bridge? N-no. Is that - he was found there?”

“Looks like he fell or was dumped off the bridge and landed on a buttress instead of going into the water.” Lamb watched his face; but everything about its movements was too large and practiced-looking to be revealing, all the lines on his face deep and simple, as if he only had a small range of expressions available to him. “It may or may not be the murder scene. To the best of your knowledge, did he ride the motorbike about town, or did he also use other means of transportation?”

“I don’t really know anything about his habits in London. I spend most of my time in Lancashire, either in Milltown or at the Abbey, and Joshua spends - spent - most of his time anywhere but there. He’s a grown man. Was a. Grown. I had other things to do than keep track of him.”

“Naturally. Now, if I understand correctly, the bookshop property belongs to the family. Do any of you besides Aziraphale have the keys?”

“Somewhere? I think? I might have them at my house, or maybe Mickey hangs onto them, since she’s in town so much more. Why would you need keys to the bookshop?”

“If Aziraphale doesn’t turn up soon we’ll need to impose on the goodwill and cooperation of the family to let us in.”

“But that - you think he might have been killed at the bookshop?”

“I didn’t say that. The purpose of investigation is to eliminate as many of possibilities as we can, till we get down to the right one. In pursuit of which - let’s get you home so we can go over the same ground with other members of your family and you can have some peace to recover in.”

Chapter Text

Into this garden crept a Serpent, the subtlest of creatures.
 – The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. A.Z. Fell, Oxford University Press, 1939

Crowley had worked hard to get here.

He’d passed the tests that qualified him to take more tests that qualified him to spend the weeks that were, for other children, summer holidays drilling on every single thing Miss Dagon found him lacking in. Table manners and general etiquette, deportment, penmanship, posture; but mostly listening and repeating, listening and repeating, listening and repeating until he could, if not unduly hurried, combine sounds into words into sentences without hissing the S’s and without Scotland coming out of his mouth.

Gran and the orphanage, between them, had already tied and caned and taunted his left hand out of reaching automatically, his right hand into managing most tasks acceptably. The Prince Foundation corrected the last of the wobble in his right-handed pen. He would never be able to write quickly with that hand, would never be able to hold anything as securely with it as with his left; but he could make do. He could pass.

No amount of walking a line with a book on his head and a brace on his back would make his hips move like everybody else’s, but he didn’t scurry or scuttle or scamper anymore. Instead he stepped right out with a swagger and a smirk, and the book stayed put, and so did the nearly-full teacup he impulsively picked up and added on top of that. Mr B. Prince had smiled when he crossed the room without spilling a drop - the only smile any candidate received on that Review Day - and said: “That’s right, Mr Crowley. If you can’t hide it, flaunt it.” (Mr B had a port wine stain as big as his hand on his face. He knew what he was talking about.)

No amount of instruction could keep letters from mixing themselves up on the page - but nobody at the Prince Foundation knew about that, because Crowley could read. He knew what combinations of sounds did and did not make words, regardless of what letters he thought he saw; knew how to take the sentence as a whole and recognize which words were possible out of those suggested by the letters as they shook out. The tedium of elocution drill paid off here, teaching him to read aloud slowly and majestically, with plenty of time to wrest meaning from the recalcitrant page. He could pass.

Every year, the Prince Foundation sieved the dregs of Britain’s orphanages, workhouses, and charity schools until they found a dozen Boys with Promise and put them through whatever they needed to be put through to make them fit to sit in a row with the sons of gentlemen and be indistinguishable from them to the ignorant eye. Every year, on Review Day, Mr B. Prince, himself, son of the Foundation’s founder, beheld the fruits of their labors and judged them. Eleven of these boys would be educated at the Foundation, by the Foundation, for the Foundation, with guaranteed jobs at the end of the educational trail - excellent jobs, as clerks, as valets, as footmen in fine houses, as secretaries, as tutors, serving the Very Best People. But on the shoulder of one of the twelve each year, Mr B would lay his hand, and say to Miss Dagon: “This one.” That boy would dine that evening with Mr B and his father, Old Mr Prince, the great Mr L. Prince, who had started as a charity boy and made himself a rich gentleman and created the Foundation to start other charity boys down the same road. That boy’s fees would be paid and his wardrobe and equipment provided, and off he would go to Wellborn Hall, to infiltrate the ruling class and learn to be someone upon whom the Very Best People would rely, whom they would pay handsomely and invite into their homes and ask advice of and marry their sisters to: a man of business, of the law, of science and industry, of medicine, of whatever, in the judgement of the trustees of the Prince Foundation, would best accrue credit (financial or social) to the Foundation. That boy, on reaching his majority, would be set up for life, no matter what gutter he was born into. And this year, that boy was, against all odds, a left-handed, odd-gaited, lisping, ginger Scot.

Crowley had worked like a demon to get here, and it was horrible.

The food arrived at regularly stated intervals, but that was the only thing that could be said in its favor. The tea was always a pale straw color, with just enough milk to cloud the liquid. The porridge was lumpy, the soup cold, the milk warm and faintly blue, the vegetables boiled into indistinguishable gray blobs, the meat tough, the puddings small, the fruit bruised, the cheese clammy, the bread gritty. In the unheated bedchambers, the mattresses were thin, the sheets coarse, the windows curtained by a greasy film of soot from smoky chimneys. The classrooms smelled of chalk and damp and boys. The vast drafty echoing bathrooms, with no provisions for privacy, harbored spiders and blackbeetles in the shadows beneath the baths. They had running water, which was a huge improvement over the baths in the orphanage, but this water ran either scalding hot or freezing cold, with no temperature in between. At least one water closet was always clogged.

Eleven-year-old First Form students, the youngest at Wellborn Hall, were stored six to a room on the first floor, lined up on either side of a dank brown corridor that smelled of damp socks and the vinegar with which the charlady scrubbed the worn floors once a week. The six charity boys the school was required, by charter, to accept were stored in the smallest room, the one with only one window, one chest of six drawers, one washbasin, and one chamberpot; the one nearest the stairs where the youngest master rang the rising bell; where they could hear older boys stamping their feet on their way to their rooms above and calling to each other, after the youngest boys were supposed to be asleep; where the draft was strongest.

Charity boys wore the same gray uniforms as the boys with families who paid their school fees, the same black-and-gold striped ties, the same gray caps and gray stockings and black boots. But everybody knew who they were. They were all seated at the same table in the dining hall, and at the very first assembly the Headmaster pointed them out to “welcome” them as part of his speech, urging them to make the most of their opportunities and the other boys, in the mildest and blandest terms imaginable, to embrace their less fortunate brothers whose diligence and worth had won for them the privilege of being here. They felt the flat rejecting eyes of the sons of the gentry turned upon them, and knew what they were in for. They didn’t need it spelled out for them; they had all been there before.

The Sixth Form Prince Boy (only two of his year’s charity boys had lasted till Sixth Form, but one of them was inevitably the Prince Boy) spelled it out for them anyway, when he and his fellow survivor showed them their room and went over the rules with them. “The school’s charter requires that they take on six new charity boys per year,” said Ligur. “It doesn’t require them to go out of their way to see you keep your scholarships. It doesn’t require them to notice when a posh boy trips you on the stairs or steals your pudding or calls you a nigger or a nancy or a dago under their breaths. It requires them to hold you to all the standards of the school and you know they’ll do that, rigorously, while they let the toffs slide. It requires them to make no difference in treatment between boys and you know how that’ll go!”

All the boys nodded. Grimsby, the smallest, whimpered. Ligur kicked him. “None of that! If you show weakness they’ll tear you apart. So don’t show weakness, not even in here, not even alone! You had to be smarter and tougher than any of them to get here, so use it. You all have some way to survive, whether you know it or not. Figure out what it is and perfect it.” He slapped the other boy on the back. “Froggy Hastur here’s the best all-around rugby player the school has ever seen. There’s some who’re faster, there’s one who’s stronger, there’s lots that are smarter, but every one of them wants Froggy on their team.”

“Broke a lord’s leg once,” grinned Froggy, who was tall and pale and spotty. “I didn’t miss a game. And if any of you lot spread any rumors that it was on purpose, I won’t miss a game over any of you, either.”

“What’s your trick, then?” Crowley asked, from the bed by the window - the best in the room, which Ligur had made it clear to the other boys was the rightful property of each year’s Prince Boy. “It must be a good one.” Because Ligur was the blackest person he’d ever seen, and he’d seen a few, in his Gran’s pub and in the orphanage and the streets of Edinburgh, where the Empire came and went. He’d never seen one standing so straight, in such posh duds, with his hair so neat, his head so high, and his hands so clean, talking with so much authority and assurance to white boys.

“Me?” Ligur grinned, showing all his perfect teeth. “I’m a mirror. I’m all of them, and none of them, and they like me in spite of themselves because if they don’t, they’re hating themselves. Not one of ‘em knows who I am but every one of them thinks they do, and I know every one of them down to the ground.”

“And it’s a funny coincidence, but every single person who thinks they’ve gotten one up on Ligur finds themselves in the infirmary not long after, and it’s always an accident.” Froggy laughed a loose wet laugh.

Some of the boys laughed with him. Crowley didn’t. He stayed focused on Ligur. “How long did that take? You didn’t get them all in your pocket on the first day.”

“Not on the first day and not in the first year,” agreed Ligur. “I had things running pretty smooth by Third Form, though. Don’t try to imitate me. And don’t come running to me or any other older boy for help. We can’t afford to carry your weight. We’ve got enough to do carrying ourselves. Find your own strength and use it. Or don’t, and lose your scholarship. That’s how it works.”

“But -“ said Grimsby.

“Shut up. We’re done with you. We’re proof it can be done and if that’s not enough for you, that’s not our problem.” He turned on his heel, and left, Froggy opening the door for him and walking out behind him. The room was silent for a moment.

“He never went over the rules,” said Grimsby, biting his nails. 

“He went over the important ones,” said Crowley, sliding off his bed and picking up the box Miss Dagon had handed up to him in the pony trap that had brought him here. “Everything we can get officially punished for will be in the handbook. One of us can read that bit out loud while we’re putting our things away. Bags I the center drawer. Who has top marks for reading?”

So Grimsby read the rules aloud to them while they filled the chest of drawers, and Crowley put his things away for him in the drawer beneath his own, so they were the only two in the room who didn’t have to kneel down or stand on tiptoe to get their duds. Everyone knew where they were and what was required of them, after that. Which was better than not knowing, but didn’t help as much as would have been nice.

To no one’s surprise, the prefects were much better at spotting the infractions of charity boys than of anyone else, and the fact that someone’s tie was askew or cap missing due to the action of a non-charity boy made no difference to them. Crowley managed to evade their attentions until the end of the second day, when in the midst of the rush to take advantage of the outdoors before dark fell, he felt a heavy hand fall on his shoulder. “No running!” 

The prefect was a hulking Sixth-Former he’d heard addressed as “Fell Major.” Crowley looked up at his chiseled face and surprising violet eyes, and without conscious thought committed to a tactic. “All right,” he drawled, in his very best elocution-lesson voice, as a toff dashed by twice as fast as Crowley’d been going. “If you say I was running, guess I must have been. Conduct mark, is it?” 

“Just to make sure you remember the rule in the future.” Fell Major flashed teeth at him in what might have been intended as a kindly smile, but was probably meant to be every bit the predatory grin it came across as. “Name?” He flipped open a neat little notebook and poised a neat little pencil.

“Crowley.”

“All right, Crawly -“

“Crowley. C-R-O-W-L-E-Y.”

“Sorry, my mistake, Crawly.” But he wrote it down correctly - how else could this be properly held against his victim? “Carry on.”

So Crowley carried on, stretching his legs out as long as they would go and placing his feet so that they came down in one smooth line and his hips moved like a pendulum. He’d sauntered his way almost to the cloakroom when the heavy hand came down on him again. “Walk properly, Crawly, or I’ll put you down for cheek.”

“There’s no rules against walking.”

“No running, no acrobatics.”

“It’s not acrobatics. It’s just walking. It’s how I walk. The only way I can, if I use my feet. ” He dropped his hands down, flipped his heels up, and took three steps on his palms, as erect and dignified as a vicar going up the aisle of a church. This was long enough for every body in the corridor to notice, and make way, and cheer; and cheer again when he flipped himself back to his feet, turning mid-air to face Fell Major, who stood there with his jaw dropped. “That was acrobatics. You can mark me down for that, if you like. But nowhere in the rules does it say that having wonky hips is worth a conduct mark. I know, because when you walk like I do, that’s the sort of thing you check.”

So he got a second mark on the heels of the first, but he’d won the encounter, and every boy in the corridor knew it. By nightfall, every boy in school knew it. Most of his free time for the next three days was spent teaching the entire First and Second Forms to walk on their hands, except for Grimsby, whose arms wouldn’t hold him, and some stodgy bookworm who spent the entire time in the First Form Common Room, reading. The fact that the name “Crawly” stuck to him stung a little, but he didn’t let that show. 

Classes were tricky, because it didn’t do to outshine the wrong boys, but scholarships weren’t renewed for boys who couldn’t outshine anybody. Grimsby made the mistake of raising his hand too often in history, grammar, and Latin, and got his toes stepped on, his cap stolen, and the contents of his pencil case raided for his pains. Crowley lounged and slouched and fidgeted through each class. It would take some time to perfect the behavior to the point that the masters were provoked to pounce on him only when he knew or could improvise the answer to the question they had posed, but he was confident he could master it. The stodgy bookworm, who talked more like a master than a schoolboy, often knew the answer even when Grimsby didn’t, so there weren’t many question posed with no volunteers. He had time to study up.

Except in maths. Grimsby excelled at arithmetic, but struggled with concepts to which his grammar school had not introduced him, while the bookworm tended to sit with a fixed smile on his round rosy face, hazel eyes blank, plump hands folded on his desk. When asked to repeat a rule or principle he always did so flawlessly in a voice so priggish it was impossible to parody; but if told to actually work a problem he would do so with much frowning and concentration, and invariably be wrong. He drove the maths master to distraction and made the whole class laugh, whereupon he would clasp his hands in front of his stomach, titter nervously, turn bright pink, and shuffle back to his seat, shrinking in upon himself as well as a chubby boy could. He bore the ridiculous name of Fell Minimus, and he was a ridiculous person, with a ridiculous nose; but no one tormented him that first week, presumably because he was the brother of Fell Major and at least one other older boy, who would be Fell Minor. Generally speaking, school culture dictated that the First Form must learn to look after themselves; but multiple brothers were presumably good for something, all the same.

Crowley had been afraid that Ligur’s decree that he have the best bed had set him up for a fight. He had no desire to be the leader of anything, certainly not of the boys at the very bottom of the school hierarchy, but Ligur had made it clear that the Prince Boy of each yearly cohort held this place and any meager privileges belonging to it, and he’d be damned if, once placed there, he’d let himself be pushed out of it. No challenger for the position materialized, however, for the other five had earned their scholarships by being swots, and by the time they realized that swotting was not enough to get by on, he would be too well-established for rebellion. He was, after all, the one who taught the other boys to walk on their hands; the one who scored off Fell Major; the one who got Grimsby’s cap back by sauntering casually into the fray as if joining the game of keep-away, snatching it out of the air, and plopping it backwards onto its owner’s head; the one who could fold his handkerchief into a rat that could appear to creep independently up his arm. He carried the responsibility as lightly as he could, being far more concerned about sorting the masters and other boys into categories of danger and advantage; who he must flatter, who he must evade, who he must, however reluctantly, impress; and with whom he must consider himself at war.

The Games Master was a danger - a loud and truculent man, to whom Crowley’s peculiar gait was an offense but his ability to use each hand more or less equally was a coveted asset. The Latin Master was also highly dangerous, as he was in the best position to learn the secret of the enmity print held for Crowley. How was he to know whether a q, a p, a b,  a d, an h, or a y belonged in any given place among words that were only so many unfamiliar sounds? In both classes he affected great unconcern, doing as he was bid as leisurely as possible without earning himself a conduct mark, and studying both masters for mannerisms he could mimic, in order to turn his mistakes into satires. The rest of the masters were potentially assets, if he kept his head down and did well while avoiding becoming anybody’s favorite.

The biggest threats, of course, were other boys. The prefects were all prats - it was a primary qualification for the post, so far as Crowley could tell - and Fell Major the biggest prat of all. He must either be not encountered, or scored off of: there was no middle ground. And scoring must be carefully calibrated not to cross a line which it was urgent to determine, as he realized when he saw a broad squat Sixth Former, impossibly, lift a taller Fifth Form boy by his tie and hang him from one upstretched  hand while demanding an apology for some offense Crowley had not witnessed. In the midst of this encounter Fell Major happened along, waiting patiently until the increasingly purple-faced Fifth Former managed to choke out an acceptably abject expression of remorse, at which point he slapped both parties on the back, said: “Glad that’s settled! No need to give out conduct marks if everyone’s learned their lesson. Be more careful next time. C’mon, Sandy,” and departed with the hulk in tow. A little discreet questioning identified Sandy the Hulk as Fell Major’s cousin (Fell Secundus, to the masters) and good right arm. Fell Major, he was reliably assured by an older boy who also witnessed this and seemed to take satisfaction in relieving the ignorance of a new boy, would never, ever, under any circumstance break a rule himself; but Sandy was ready and willing at all times to break them on his behalf, and he was rugby captain. “A master broke a cane on him once,” said his informant, with obvious admiration. “It makes no difference to him.”

Obviously Fells wanted watching. Crowley kept his eyes open. Fell Minor, when identified, was a sober bespectacled swot more commonly called Doc by the boys. He and Fell Minimus seemed innocuous enough by themselves, but must be dangerous by association. Crowley swore to himself to avoid them all religiously. 

On Friday, a raid on Grimsby’s pencil case between History and Latin resulted in a careless heavy boot (nicknames were still settling down, but Burns-Snagforth was already Rhino for multiple reasons, only one of which was the astonishing wart on his nose) coming down on his flimsy ruler and not just breaking but shattering it into three irregular splintered lengths. The bell had already gone, it wasn’t really his business, and Crowley couldn’t afford a single misstep in Latin, so he pretended not to see and pretended not to hurry to sling himself into his place on the bench, where they were seated alphabetically pending the assignment of seats based on class ranking come Monday, an event to which no one looked forward, except possibly Fell Minimus, who would be head of the class and was always miraculously in place reading before anyone else made it to the room. Today, however, when the master came in at the front Fell Minimus was coming in at the back, pausing to hold the door for Grimsby and then close it after him. Both boys tried to make themselves smaller as they squeezed past Crowley, Eden-Fisher, and Fallon to take their places in the center of the bench.  “If we are all quite settled?” The master said, in a quelling tone that made it clear that rewarding his sarcasm with laughter would be a mistake.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Fell Minimus. “There was rather a scrum in the corridor and Grimsby and I had to chase down some errant pencils. It won’t happen again, sir.” Grimsby looked scared, hopeful, and a bit dazed.

“Very well, see that it doesn’t,” said the master. “Page thirty-two, if you please, and have your notebooks out.”

Notebooks would be examined periodically for neatness, and Crowley had a certain amount of trouble keeping up even the minimum of notes to any kind of standard with his right hand, so when it came time to lay out the diagram intended to guide the class through a conjugation he was much too occupied ruling his lines straight to pay attention to anyone else, until the master broke in upon the scratching of pencils to say, in mild reproachful tones: “Fell Minimus! What happened to your ruler?”

“I seem to have mislaid it, sir,” said Fell Minimus, as all eyes in the rooms turned his way - all except Grimsby’s, who diligently kept ruling his notebook with a fine sturdy ruler. Fell Minimus, however, was using the edge of his Latin book for the same purpose. “Must have lain it down somewhere and walked off. I was probably reading. I’d forget my own head when I’m reading, if I didn’t need my eyes to read with.”

“It’s early in the year to be mislaying your equipment,” said the master. “I ought to mark you down for it.”

“Yes, sir. I understand that, sir.” Fell Minimus blinked innocently above an apologetic smile. He had eyelashes as long as a girl’s, and his fair curly hair framed his face, and altogether if he’d traded in his uniform for wings he’d have looked like one of the baby cherubs supporting the arms of the school over the front door and in the dining hall.

The master looked from Fell Minimus to Grimsby (ferociously focused on making his lines heavier) and back again, and sighed. “You’ll be cleaning the blackboard at the end of class,” he said, and began to run through the forms of the verb.

It was the last class of the day. When dismissed, everyone departed as rapidly as they could without breaking the no-running rule, except Fell Minimus, who dutifully went to the blackboard, and Crowley, who took his time packing away his pencils, pens, ruler, India rubber, books, and notebook, so that it was perfectly natural for him to rise as the other boy was turning away from his task, and for them to exit the room at the same moment.

(“They will never be your friends,” said old Mr Prince, cutting his bloody steak so that the juice ran rusty into the potatoes. “They may mean to, but they can’t help it. You are a charity boy and they will instinctively make use of you. But they are younger than you in all the ways that matter, and as long as you remember that they are not your friends, you can use them right back. You are not going to school to make friends. You are going to school to make connections.”)

“What the deuce was that about?” Crowley asked. “It’s not your fault he didn’t have a ruler. “

“Well, Rhino wasn’t going to give him one, was he?” Fell Minimus hunched his shoulders. “Grimsby’s so small, and he gets conduct marks all the time because the other boys won’t leave him alone, and I can’t interfere because that’s coddling, which I’m not really sure why that’s so bad, but heaven knows what sort of pocket money he gets, and Rhino’s got the next bed to mine and I’m fed up of him, and well, if an angel can give away his flaming sword it seems positively feeble for me not to give away a ruler.”

Crowley absorbed this spate of words as best he could. “Angels don’t give away flaming swords,” he said. “They smite people with them, I think.”

“Yes, well. You see. When Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden, one of the angels felt bad about it, because they were only wearing fig leaves and the night would be cold and there were vicious animals, and when no one was looking he gave his flaming sword to Adam.”

“Maybe it’s because Gran was chapel, but I don’t remember anything like that in the story of the Garden of Eden.”

“I don’t suppose many people do. It’s in a book at home. A very old book. Some monks wrote it when our house was part of an abbey, and they hid it away when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, and then later one of my great-great-uncles found it and translated it. It has perfectly gorgeous pictures in it. Not the translation, the original book. My mother loved it. She, um, we’re all named after angels, so when I was born she named me after the one in the book. I’m sorry, I’m sure you don’t care about any of that.” 

He looked so shamefaced Crowley couldn’t help pressing. “Oh? What’s this angel’s name, then?”

Fell Minimus heaved a sigh. “Aziraphale.”

“Aziraphale?”

“I know! I know! It’s worse than Fell Minimus!”

“Naw, nothing’s worse than Fell Minimus. Except maybe Crawly. Why don’t you have another name yet, then?”

“I’ve got half a dozen, each as bad as the next. There’s Azzy, and Az, and Zira, and Phalie, and somebody found out my middle name, which is -“ He squeezed his eyes shut, “Zebulon. Which gets us first to Zeb and then to Zed. And what I’m really afraid of is that someone will pick up on what my brothers call me.”

“Which is?” Crowley inquired, fascinated.

Aziraphale Zebulon Fell (Minimus) looked down and away, mumbling.

Crowley leaned in. “Pardon? I didn’t catch that.”

The other boy glanced around, but they were the only ones in the corridor. “Sunshine,” he whispered, turning red as a beet. 

Crowley laughed. 

Fell Minimus huffed, frowning, which was obviously against the natural inclination of his face.

Crowley stuck out his hand. “Antoin Jehosaphat Crowley, at your service.”

“Oh, you poor dear boy!” Fell Minimus’s smooth face crinkled up around a smile that sat there perfectly between two round apple cheeks as he took the hand and shook it.

“It’s only initials on my paperwork, so if you ever tell anybody, I will be forced to destroy every writing implement you own.”

“Yes, I quite see that! And - I’m sorry about the nickname my brother saddled you with. Gabriel doesn’t mean to be unkind, but he can be thoughtless.”

“Eh, not your fault your brother’s a prat.”

Fell Minimus pulled open the door of the First Floor Common Room and stood aside. “After you, Mr Crowley.”

Crowley couldn’t remember climbing the steps to get here. “Wait, why are we here? It’s still light out, no rain, we should be outside.”

“Perhaps you should. I was in the middle of a perfectly ripping book at light’s out last night and I’ve been carrying it around all day without being able to snatch an instant to return to it.” 

Crowley laughed again. “All right, Angel,” he said. “I won’t keep you from it. See you.”

He was halfway downstairs again before he remembered his resolve to avoid even harmless-looking Fells. Oh, well. He’d be more careful going forward.

Crowley got in on a game of Fox and Hounds and thought no more about it, till they were all in the common room after supper, and noted that, instead of putting himself in the middle of the charity boys as he had sensibly done so far, Grimsby got a ragged copy of Robinson Crusoe off the bookcase and sat on the edge of the group, between them and Fell Minimus, who had secured one of the more comfortable chairs, in the direct light of a lamp, in which to continue reading his ripping book. Or possibly another one. He seemed to be a fast reader, and where they all came from Crowley had no idea, because they were all clean and new-looking.  Crowley got out the snakes and ladders board and laid it out on the floor, the table having been taken over by a group with a greasy set of cards, and everyone amused themselves as best they could with no disruptions he need concern himself with.

Saturday was games in the morning and free time in the afternoon, so for boys whose feet and hips never ached it was a day of unalloyed delight. Running all over a field bouncing balls off body parts had never been something that seemed worth the pains to Crowley, but he was reasonably good at stealing balls, since it was hard for people to tell precisely where he was going. Most of the First Form had a week’s worth of flat-out running to catch up on, so the game was a bit of a free-for-all, and that was all right for him, too. Grimsby and one or two of the toffs, though, had demonstrated, earlier in the week, a complete inability to detect a ball coming toward them until it was too late to do anything about it, and a few boys decided to take advantage of this to wallop them - including one of the charity boys, though to his credit he targeted the toffs instead of poor Grimsby. Since the Games Master, for all his jaw about fair play and sportsmanship, had three games to monitor and only one assistant, Crowley added a bit of interest to his day by trying to spot these fouls coming so he could steal the ball on its way in. About midway through the bout he realized that Fell Minimus, who was not fast but was tolerably solid, was, rather than tracking the ball, doing his best to shadow the near-sighted boys and block the shots as they came when he could. He never attempted to play a ball (earlier in the week he had proved that he couldn’t dribble or kick straight at all), but he always cried out when hit by one, giving the boy he’d buffered a chance to notice where the ball went and attempt to play it themselves. Grimsby actually scored a goal, purely by accident, on one of these occasions, and stood there in blank astonishment with his mouth open as the Games Master blew his whistle and declared the game over and one team or the other the winner. Crowley was too busy laughing at Grimsby’s expression to notice which one, and it wasn’t as if he cared.

“Well-played, Grimsby,” said Fell Minimus, with a smile that crinkled his eyes. “Good for you.” Then off they all went to the changing room.

The changing room was chaos, an environment which Crowley disliked but could negotiate reasonably well; it was, after all, not nearly so chaotic as the streets of Edinburgh where he’d lived on his own for most of a year after Gran died. Alas, Grimsby, who had come to school from  the bosom of a loving family, was not nearly so good at slipping around potential disaster. Crowley didn’t see what happened, but he heard the snap of the towel and the yelp of pain clearly enough, and turned his head to observe.

“Oh, stop blubbing, goal-stealer,” said Rhino.

“We were on the same team,” protested Grimsby, who was not blubbing. Exactly.

“But it should have been my goal!” Rhino loomed over him. “And then you go and step on my foot! A towel snap’s the least you deserve and it’s not like it really hurt, you big baby.”

“I didn’t mean to step on your foot and I’m barefoot anyway! I’m sorry!” Grimsby tried to get away, but there was a wall in the way in one direction and a bench in the other, and Rhino was between him and his shoes.

“You should be,” said Rhino, looming closer.

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” said Fell Minimus, stepping between them, “You’re not impressing anybody like this, Rhino!”

“Mind your own business, goody-two-shoes!” 

Grimsby seized his chance and hopped over the bench.

“I’m just saying,” said Fell Minimus. “If you want a name for physical prowess you have to punch in your weight class. If you go around terrorizing smaller boys the only name you’ll get is coward.”

A delighted “ooooh” ran through the crowd forming around this scene, but Crowley winced and muttered, “Don’t be an idiot, Angel!” Grimsby nipped around behind Rhino and retrieved his shoes.

“Don’t call me a coward, you namby-pamby bookworm!”

Grimsby, his face as grim as his name, wisely put his back against the wall to put on his shoes.

“I didn’t call you anything, but that is the word for people who avoid confrontation with those their size or larger, is it not? Someone who reserves his threats for those who cannot, in return, threaten him?”

“He’s right, Rhino! Pick on someone your own size!” This helpful advice came from the back of the crowd.

Crowley sidled up to Grimsby, whose eyes were fixed on the altercation and whose posture telegraphed intent. “Don’t,” he said. “Fighting’s a caning offense, win or lose, and you’ll feel that and the fight more than Rhino or your Guardian Angel there.”

“Nobody here like that,” piped up someone else. “His wart’s bigger than most of us.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Grimsby. “You keep your thumb outside when making a fist, right?”

“Now that wasn’t kind.” Angel smiled benignly at Rhino. “You can’t help having a wart. You can, however, choose not to be one.”

Crowley sighed in exasperation. ‘No fists. Run at him with your head down, get him right here,” touching Grimsby’s back above the kidney. 

Grimsby braced.

Rhino swung, connected to Angel’s unflinching chin with a sickening cracking noise - and screamed, an instant before Angel was sick all over him.

It was a spectacular moment that stole Grimsby’s momentum and froze every boy in the place: bile everywhere, Rhino on the floor clutching his fist to his chest and screaming under the chunky brownish-yellow rain. Then the Games Master thundered in roaring: “What’s going on in here!”

Rhino was too busy screaming and Angel too busy being sick again, bending over and politely trying not to spatter on his opponent, to answer. Every other mouth in the place clamped shut. Fighting was a caning offense, but tale-bearing would mark a boy as a pariah for eternity. The Games Master, with a look of disgust at the mess Angel was making, pulled Rhino up by the arm and yelled: “Somebody fetch a basin! Burns-Snagforth, were you fighting?” 

Rhino sobbed and shook his head. 

“Well, what happened, then? Buck up, man!”

“I - I - “ Rhino’s eyes darted wildly as he considered his options. “I - I punched the wall, sir.”

“What did you do a fool thing like that for?” One of the games master’s assistants shoved a basin into Angel’s hands. He obligingly strained out some more bile. His breakfast seemed to be all gone, one way or another.The Games Master, with unexpected gentleness, pulled the hurt hand away from Rhino’s chest to examine it, eliciting another scream. “You’ve probably broken it, you little idiot! That’s what happens when you hit something with no give in it!”

Above the basin, Angel’s eyes flew open, his face one of abject horror and remorse. He opened his mouth and moved it as if to speak, but instead was sick again. Crowley groaned inwardly. He couldn’t allow the posh idiot to spoil an altercation so perfect. It’d be like letting someone take a hammer to the Greyfriars Bobby Fountain. He found himself stepping forward and saying: “It’s my fault, sir. I dared him to. I didn’t think he’d be daft enough to do it and I didn’t know it’d break his hand.”

“Then you’re as daft as he is!” The Games Master drew himself up, pointing first at Crowley, then at Aziraphale and Rhino, as he spoke. “You, detention. Wait for me. You two, with me, to the infirmary. Everybody else, finish dressing and get to lunch! Carry the basin, Fell, and don’t blub, for pity’s sake. I’ve seen grown men turn sick when they heard a bone snap, nothing to get upset about.”

Detentions were held in an airless classroom squeezed between the staff offices and the dining hall, with a single dirty window, nailed shut, high in one wall. Crowley spent a fair amount of the lunch period there, under the bored eye of a weedy undermaster, growing increasingly hungry, to the point that even the vague cabbagey smell from the kitchen seemed appetizing. When the  Games Master showed up at last he carried a cane. Crowley stood up respectfully. The undermaster glanced up from the stack of papers he was grading, and looked down again, becoming very focused.

“Well, Mr Crowley,” said the Games Master. “What have you got to say for yourself?”

“Nothing, sir,” said Crowley. 

“What? Nothing at all?”

“I don’t know what you want me to ssay,” said Crowley. The Games Master’s arms were thick and the cane was thin, a bad combination, and the lisp would come out. “I dared him. He took the dare. Neither one of uss knew he’d break his hand. I’m ssorry now but his hand’s sstill broken no matter how many times I ssay it. I’ll never do ssuch a thing again but you don’t know if you can believe me. Sso I reckon I’m for it.”

“Yes, you are. Broken bones on the playing field are one thing, Mr Crowley. They are the result of accident, misfortune, and sometimes bad judgement; but on the whole, they are a sign of pluck and dedication and are nothing to be ashamed of. Broken bones in the changing room are unusual, and indicative of great stupidity, great carelessness, or great cruelty, as well as a shameful lack of discipline. And just to be sure you remember that, you are going to get a taste - just the barest taste - of what Burns-Snagforth is suffering right now. Hold out your hands.”

Crowley thought of several things to say, and bit his tongue instead, holding out his hands. The cane made a whistling sound in the air before it came down with a loud crack across his palms. His Gran had been a good hand with a cane, and there had been a certain wild abandon in the canings distributed at the orphanage which had made them peculiarly fearsome; but the Games Master approached the problem with a scientific steadiness and detachment that managed to strike the same spot again and again, so that six strokes hurt worse than a dozen. He examined Crowley’s palms like a carpenter examining a join he’d just hammered in, said: “That’ll do. Broke the skin a bit, but nothing that needs a bandage. Keep your hands clean, Mr Crowley - none of this larking about walking upside-down. Go get lunch, and don’t let anybody catch you in there after the bell goes for the next one.”

He could only snatch the last of the bread and margarine and a bowl of watery broth with a few stray bits of cabbage in it before being driven out so the cooks could set out new viands for the next batch of boys. His hands hurt, his head ached, his hips and feet were giving him the pip, and he’d as soon hang himself as run about outside any more, so he sauntered vaguely toward the residence wing, hoping he could sneak a nap.

His path led him right by the infirmary, where he paused to consider looking in and inquiring about Angel and his victim. Reminding himself that he was avoiding Fells and that Rhino deserved what he got, he resumed walking; but the sound of voices arrested him as he was about to turn the corner to the stair corridor.

“...narrow escape! Confessing now would be even stupider than doing it in the first place! They’d cane you for fighting, you idiot!” 

For a moment Crowley didn’t recognize Fell Major’s voice. It sounded too loud and adult and furious, with none of the smug prim prefect tones that had imbued every word he’d heard him utter before. There was no mistaking the next voice, though.

“I know, but I deserve it! I broke his hand!”

“It’s not like you did that on purpose,” said an unfamiliar voice, soothingly. “Calm down, Bolt! I think it was jolly clever, except for that one serious miscalculation. Nobody’ll ever raise a hand to him again.”

“Except the masters,” sneered a voice that made Crowley’s spine cold. “And what do you suppose will happen when they cane you, Sunshine?”

“I’ll be sick again, but -“

“You’ll be sick on a master,” thundered Fell Major. 

“No I won’t! I’ll explain what happens and they’ll give me a basin and -“

“Nobody’s going to give you a basin to be sick in while they cane you, you cretin! They’ll decide you’re too delicate for school and send you home! And then the rest of us will have to live with the shame of having a brother so strong he can break bones and so feeble he can’t bear to be struck, at the same time! It won’t matter much to Sandy and me, but Raffles and the Lamb will never be able to live it down.”

“The Lamb won’t get here for ages,” said the soothing voice. “They’ll have forgotten by then.”

Crowley, moving slowly and silently, sidled back and sideways until he could see the group huddled near the foot of the stairs with little danger of them seeing him. He was vaguely aware that in the posh world he was trying to enter this was considered low, sneaking behavior; but that attitude was a privilege granted by poshness. It’d be fine as long as he wasn’t caught.

“You mean like they’ve forgotten Tubby Smith, who sleepwalked into the Sixth Form Common Room and took a leak on Staunton Helmsworth, the head boy, in 1892?” The sneering voice was Sandy, who stood behind Angel with one hand bearing down on each hunched shoulder. “Like they’ve forgotten Catfoot Fortinbras, who was trapped naked on the conservatory roof and had to be rescued while parents were arriving for school-leaving exercises in 1876? Schools don’t forget these things. If you’re expelled for losing your dinner on the Headmaster our great-grandchildren will arrive and hear the story of your disgrace before they get their room assignments!” He shook Angel as if he were a dustrag he was trying to clean.

“Will you stop blubbing?” Fell Major looked down at his brother with a lofty indifference that reminded Crowley of the Trustee of the Orphanage who had explained the Prince Foundation Scholarship to him. “We’re doing this for your own good. You’ve had a narrow escape. Keep your fool trap shut and stay escaped, you gormless goose!”

“You’re lucky that other boy covered for you,” said bespectacled Fell Minor aka Doc, who owned the soothing voice. “It’d be ungrateful to him to waste that, don’t you think? Not only that, but you’d be calling him and Rhino liars.”

Angel gulped and wrung his soft, plump, uncaned hands. “I sup - I suppose so. But - ”

“Exactly!” Fell Major grinned an unmirthful grin at him. “Now buck up! You’ve already made us late getting off to town, so take yourself up to your room and rest like the nurse told you to, and stop fretting! You’re not going to Hell for doing what you need to do to stay in school and not disgrace the family name. All right now? C’mon, Sandy, if we double-time it we can catch up to the others.”

Sandy released Angel, who sagged a bit, and Crowley stepped back to avoid being seen as the two oldest boys headed briskly for the exit. Doc did not follow immediately. “You all right? Want anything from town?”

“I need, I need a new ruler,” Angel sniffed. “If you don’t mind. I don’t know how I’m to replace the one I, I lost otherwise.”

“Of course I don’t mind. There’s always some older boy who peddles extra supplies to boys too young for town privileges, but he always charges the Earth and I don’t know who it is yet this year. I’ll bring you something from the bakeshop, too, all right? Saturday tea is always stale bread and margarine, hardly worth eating.”

“Oh, would you? Please? Only - no, no, I shouldn’t have anything nice if nobody else does.” The contrast between the happy gratitude of the first part of this speech and the dejection of the second part did something to a part of Crowley’s insides he’d thought had stopped functioning forever when he threw his handful of dirt onto Gran’s coffin.

Doc had a surprisingly nice laugh. “I’ve got lots of pocket money, you know. I can bring enough for the whole First Form, if you like.”

“Really?” Angel sounded much more himself now. “That would be ripping! And I’ll pay you back.”

“No, you won’t. It’s my treat. I know you wouldn’t enjoy a bite if even one charity boy looked at you wistfully, and I know you’ve had a hard week. It’ll get harder before it gets easier, too, but it will get easier. I promise. Now, off upstairs with you!”

Crowley waited until he heard the door to the exit corridor close behind Doc, and Angel’s footsteps had trudged halfway up the stairs, before he turned the corner and headed up himself, still trying to sort through his reactions, among which a powerful hatred of Fell Major and Sandy, and a burning curiosity about Angel, predominated. His long legs were more comfortable taking the steps two at a time, anyway, so he easily caught up at the landing. “Hullo, Angel,” he said. “Feeling better?”

“Oh! Crowley! Yes. Um. Thank you, for speaking up. I’m so sorry you got detention on my account! You didn’t need to do that.”

“No, I didn’t,” Crowley agreed, flexing his hands and holding them so the other boy couldn’t see the welts. “But I could see you were about to throw away all the ground you’d gained on Rhino and that would’ve been bad for everybody, you know. He needed to come down a peg.”

Angel sighed, opening the common room door and gesturing him to go in first. This time, Crowley did so. “True as that is, breaking his hand was too much. But honestly, I had no idea that would happen!”

“But you did know you’d be sick on him.”

“I - well, yes.” He wrung his hands.

“Brilliant!” Crowley slung himself into the best chair, through the thin places on which stuffing was not yet emerging. “C’mon, spill. Nobody’s listening. You can tell me. How’d you do it? Can you just - decide to be sick?”

“No. No, I just - always am when somebody hits me.”

“Rubbish. You got hit by balls all morning long.”

“The balls didn’t hurt at all, though!” Angel paced restlessly, wringing his plump, unmarked hands. “I don’t know why it works like this, but it does. If I get a papercut or, or, prick my finger, or even get a real cut that needs a bandage, it just hurts, but if I stub my toe or or somebody punches my arm hard enough to feel or our tutor caned me or - anything like that, what Raf- Doc calls Blunt Force Trauma, anything that’s in my stomach comes out, till it’s empty. And then I feel bad for awhile, and then I get absolutely ravenous. And all that’s very unpleasant, but - well, I thought it would be worth it, if it made Rhino think twice about being a rotter in future.”

“Oh, he will,” Crowley assured him. “Don’t tell him it’s only when you get hit, though. If the boys think you can do it at will, they’ll never risk your wrath.”

“You really think so?” Angel paused in his pacing to look at him with hope in his eyes.

“Not a doubt of it. But - the other thing - I’ve been hit on the chin. Your head goes back, snap!” He demonstrated with a jerk. “But yours didn’t! How on earth did you do that?”

“I didn’t do it on purpose! Not really!” Angel sounded desperate to be believed, his eyes gone very wide. “And I didn’t know it would break him! He broke his hand because I was so focused on standing firm and keeping a position that would make sure the sicking had, had maximum impact -“

“Yes, yes, I understand that. But how on earth did you manage to stand firm? He’s taller and heavier than you and he had a good windup on that swing.”

Angel fiddled with the edges of his jacket. “Oh, well, if you must know -“

“I absolutely must! Dying of curiosity. You wouldn’t want my death on your conscience, I know.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t die. Or anyway, satisfaction would bring you back, like the cat.”

“Not if the curiosity wasn’t satisfied! I promise I won’t tell anybody else.”

Angel sighed. “It’s not a secret, exactly, only - it’s because I’m a freak of nature.”

“A freak of nature how?”

“It’s just - it’s something that crops up in the family, sometimes. Sandy’s like this, too, and I had a great-uncle once who ran off to join the circus when he was ten and was displayed as the Infant Hercules. He was very short, you see. Nobody knows what causes it. Sometimes the muscles and things are just, just abnormally strong, that’s all. We’ll be learning to walk, trying to pull ourselves up on furniture and so on, and instead we’re pushing the furniture over, or smashing it, or throwing things that grownups find heavy and giggling, and, and breaking things. I broke - I remember breaking, so many things! And then I’d get spanked for it and be sick all over poor Nanny - she didn’t spank me very often but I remember doing it and it was so awful! When my baby brother was born I wouldn’t touch him because he looked so, so, so incredibly breakable. And then Bolt and Sandy would give me things to throw and pick up, and tried to make me do things to win bets with people and if I didn’t want to they’d laugh at me and give me lectures about obeying my elders. Pater’d stop them if he was around but he wasn’t very often, plus he has this notion that I should go out and, and use it for something, but really all I want to do most of the time is read. I don’t like running about and lifting things and all that rot - it’s boring.”

“Gosh,” said Crowley. “You really don’t like being strong?”

“No! It’s awful! And I hate to think what the Games Master’s going to want me to do when he finds out I’m like this. He had Sandy doing weight-lifting and rugby and all sorts of dreary things.”

“Yes, but nobody can ever mess you about. Never, you know, stuff you into a cupboard for a laugh.”

“They can still play keep-away.”

“Not if you kick ‘em in the shins.”

“That’s fighting and a caning offense.”

“Only if the masters or the wrong prefect catches you. Nobody’d squeal on you.”

“And what if I broke their shin? I don’t want to hurt people! And if I did get caught fighting - and a master caned me - “ He faltered. “Do you think, what do you think would -“

“I dunno. I never heard of anybody losing their lunch all over a master. They’d only ever cane you once, though.”

“My brother says they’d send me home. Do you think they’re right?” Angel looked at him with an air of - what? Pleading? Pleading for what? What could Crowley possibly have that a toff would plead for?

“They might,” Crowley admitted. “Would that be so bad? It’s not like this place is any fun to be in. I mean - I can’t afford to get sent home. I don’t have one, for one thing. This is my big chance. But you’ve got all sorts of chances. Tutors, other schools, I dunno, tours of Europe? Don’t you? Wouldn’t it be worth being sent home, not to have to eat school dinner and sleep in the same room as Rhino and be forced to run around a field after a stupid ball?”

“You don’t think, when my baby brother came to school, the other boys would hold it over his head, that his brother had to be sent home because he couldn’t control his stomach? Because he was too feeble to take being caned like a man?”

“I dunno. Does your baby brother have the same problems?”

“Not at all. And he’s not strong. I mean, he’s not delicate or anything, but he’s thin and light-boned and compared to the rest of us he’s practically a wisp. He takes things to heart, terribly. I’ve seen him get so angry, when, when Bolt’s ragged me, and he just - he hurls himself at people and then they laugh at him because he can’t really hurt anybody and - by the time he gets here, the others’ll be gone already, and if I get sent home he’ll be here all alone. I can’t bear that idea. For him to be all alone, and people making him miserable because of me and then Pater will - I mustn’t be sent home, you see.”

“All right, then, you won’t be,” said Crowley. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll just have to see to it that you’re never caned, that’s all.”

“We? I don’t see what you have to do with it. Except. Well. You did, your speaking when you did - I would have confessed when I stopped being sick, if you hadn’t. But I wouldn’t ever ask you to! Was detention, was it very bad?”

“Eh. Had worse.” Crowley lolled back in his chair. “Stop pacing and sit down! Don’t you have a book to finish?”

“Actually I’m ready to start a new one.” Angel perched obediently in the chair on the other side of the lamp from Crowley.

“What’s this, the fifth or sixth book you’ve read this week?”

“Only the third. I can easily read a book or two a day at home, if people will leave me alone to do it, but here there’s not time.”

“Where do you get them all, then?”

“I brought them from home. I was able to fit quite a few in my trunk, and I’ve got them under my bed.” He seemed more relaxed now, the lines of his face rounding and crinkling into his more normal prissy-but-smiling expression. “I’ll have to reread a lot to get through the school year. I was hoping the school would have more, but I’ve read everything on the bookcase already, some of them several times. Pater told me strictly to not spend all my spare time reading, but, well, what else is there to do?”

Crowley shrugged. “I was thinking of taking a nap, myself.”

“Oh! Well, don’t let me keep you.” 

Did he sound - disappointed? “Naw, I’m a lot more awake now. And I sure don’t feel like getting out and running around any more fields. You play chess?”

“Certainly! Would you like to?”

“Dunno. Never done it. Used to play draughts with my Gran sometimes, but the set here is missing three black counters.”

“Well - I could teach you chess? And we’d see if you liked it?”

“If you’re sure it wouldn’t cut too much into your reading time.”

“Oh, no. No. I really do need to make them last.”

So they went to the chess set in the corner, and Angel instructed him in the moves and some basic strategies. It wasn’t bad. It was all right, in fact, though Crowley could tell his opponent went easy on him; so he studied the board, asked a lot of questions, and devised a sequence of moves that pressed his opponent pretty hard for awhile, one white piece after another leaving the board; but then Angel smiled a smug little smile, nudged his sole remaining big piece one space over and said “Checkmate,” and so it was. “You have a knack,” he told Crowley, which made him feel oddly proud. “But remember, it’s not about taking my pieces. It’s about trapping my king.”

“All right,” Crowley said. “I’ll try again.” 

But he forgot to hide his palms as he set his pieces up, reminded when Angel made a small, shocked sound. “Crowley -“

Crowley closed his hand into a fist. “Shut it. S’nothing. They used to draw blood in the orphanage.”

Angel looked horrified and all the pink left his face. “But - that’s not nothing! That’s, that’s -“

“That’s the way things are,” said Crowley. “I knew it could happen when I spoke up, and it’s better than being sent home. I’m fine. This is the second time you’ve rescued Grimsby. You don’t want him getting all soppy about that, do you? So, shut up and play.”

So they played another game, and then Angel took Crowley back to his room to show him his trunk of books, and let him pick the next one. Back in the common room, Aziraphale read aloud about Robert the Bruce, with Crowley correcting his Scottish accent and occasionally the author’s history -  “I’m a Scot! I know all about Bruce!” 

“Then why did you want to hear me read about him?”

“So I can make sure you know the truth about him, ye Sassenach!”

Sore hands and all, it was the best afternoon Crowley’d had since before Gran died. When the bell rang for tea they were both hungry enough to eat all the bread and marge the dining hall would give them, which wasn’t enough. Angel didn’t seem to notice that he’d sat at the charity boys’ table, with Crowley on one side and a breathless Grimsby on the other. He also seemed blithely unaware of the struggle several of the posh boys made with themselves before coming by to ask him if he was feeling better and assure him that Rhino had it coming. Crowley took satisfaction in their humbling, even though it was only to another toff.

When they all went upstairs together, Grimsby was the one at Angel’s elbow, chattering about some book they had both read, and Crowley was making several boys, both charity and posh, laugh in his comparison of orphanage food, school food, and pig slop; all of which stopped when the boys beheld Doc lounging on their landing, holding a stack of bakery boxes. The ruler was delivered and the boxes bourne into the fastness of the common room, where the lamps had already been lit, amid raptures of delight. Angel beamed with happiness, distributing four dozen Chelsea buns among three dozen boys, and Crowley felt a strange, light feeling in his chest as he tore into his share. Angel ate slowly, unrolling the bun and savoring each bite, not letting a single currant escape him.

This place was horrible. Crowley needed to get through it if he was ever to live a life less horrible than had seemed in store for him, even before Gran died.

But.

But.

Maybe he didn’t have to wait until he was grown up and set for life, to not feel horrible all the time.

Chapter Text

Then Cain went on his way and the Serpent lay beside Abel’s body, unweeping, for his eyes were scaled and could shed no tears. There Aziraphale found them as the night drew on and Eve called to her sons to come to dinner.“Thiss is not what I intended,” said the Serpent. “I thought they would disspute, and Cain would sspoil Abel’s ssacrificce, and  Abel would get angry, and sspoil Cain’s. Not thiss. Not thisssss!” The Angel gathered Abel into his arms and bore him to his parents’ house, allowing the Serpent to slither away into the darkness.

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, Trans. A.Z. Fell, Oxford University Press, 1939

Mrs Hostmassif, whose husband was with his fleet in the China Sea, granted Inspector Lamb and Sergeant Abbot the use of her office, which was far more businesslike than the offices from which most housewives ran their domains. The windows were covered with Venetian blinds rather than curtains, the leather-topped main desk was large and sturdy, the smaller desk presumably used by Miss Ligur was arranged conveniently both for typing and for taking dictation, the chairs rolled and swiveled, and the only other furnishings were filing cabinets and a single shelf with a row of ledgers on it. Even her stationary and pens would have looked right at home in the offices of any financial concern in the country. The occasional chair carried for the convenience of the family members as they passed through looked dainty in this almost-masculine environment. Frank found it disconcerting, but Inspector Lamb expressed his approval of arrangements. “Time and again, I’ve had to ask questions from a stool with a ruffle on it, and draw ink out of a well shaped like a snail or a pussycat! We’ll be comfortable here right enough. We’d better start with Mr. Sandalphon Fell, since we’ve got him to hand. The solicitor always knows who profits from a death, if you can get him to talk on the subject.”

According to Sandalphon Fell, however, profit was an extremely unlikely motive for shooting R Joshua Fell in the head and dumping him off a bridge with money in his pocket. He sat on the occasional chair like an anvil on a tea tray, most of the traces of hangover suppressed, along with any traces of personality. Possibly this was to compensate for the flashing of the extensive gold inlays on his teeth, which must have been very badly damaged at one time, whenever he spoke. “Joshua had an allowance of 200 pounds a year from his father, Lord Auldmon,” he explained. “It has been reduced twice since the recent downturn in business, and will not devolve onto his heir, his brother Aziraphale. He had no other claim on the body of the estate.”

“I see,” said Lamb. “Nothing for us there. Gabriel said he had another income, though?”

“I am not familiar with the present state of the income which Joshua inherited from his maternal grandparents a dozen years ago,” said Sandalphon, with an air that implied that his lack of familiarity stemmed from its lack of importance, “but given Joshua’s lifestyle and spending habits, he is unlikely to have increased its worth significantly. My impression is, that he gave most of the income away, willy-nilly, but never touched the capital, which would now pass to Aziraphale. If his chequebook and account information was not on his body, Aziraphale will most likely have them, and if not, I can facilitate your contact with his bank. He named no other heirs, and held no other significant properties that I have been made aware of.”

“I see,” said Inspector Lamb. “What was his relationship with Aziraphale like? Any sign of cooling or conflict between them, since the will was originally made?”

“Indeed not.” Frank must be imagining the note of disapproval there. “They have always been each other’s favorite brothers. They share a mother, and are much closer in age to each other than to the rest of the family. When Joshua was in England, which was not often anymore, he had standing invitations to stay here, at Gabriel’s houses in Richmond and in Milltown, and of course at the Abbey, but I couldn’t tell you the last time he took up any of them. He invariably chooses to stay with Sun - with Aziraphale when in London, even though the flat above the bookshop is extremely small and inconvenient, and when in other parts of the country he tended to stay with various ‘friends,’ not one of whom any of us except possibly Aziraphale has ever met. He hasn’t stayed at the Abbey, I know, since 1929, when he came home briefly due to the onset of his father’s illness.”

“I see. And Aziraphale was genuinely fond of him in return.”

“Aziraphale,” said Sandalphon in the driest possible voice, “is genuinely fond of everyone. Nor is he at all interested in money, as you may have guessed after seeing his bookshop. I don’t suppose he ever sells a book from one year to the next. He’s much too busy reading them. A very - simple - soul, our Sunshine. Even should he feel a need for more than he has, merely asking Joshua to transfer some of the income, or even the capital, to him would probably have been enough to get him what he wanted. He does own a gun, in the form of the revolver issued to him during the War, but the idea of his ever shooting anyone with it is ludicrous.”

“Oh, come, he must’ve done during the War,” said Lamb. “They made us shoot quite a lot, as I recall, though it wasn’t something most of us were all that inclined to do. What rank did he have?”

“Started as a Second Leftenant, ended as Captain, mostly on the strength of longevity,” said Sandalphon. “We both volunteered in 1914, and stayed the distance, but I saw a good bit more action than he did, and made major. He was far more focused on keeping his men alive than in killing the enemy.”

Frank saw something in Lamb’s face then, that he couldn’t identify, but recognized; a look he, who remembered the War primarily as an excuse the adults used for why so many things were unsatisfactory, accepted that he would never truly understand. “Well, we couldn’t see who we killed, generally speaking,” Lamb said equably. “We saw who was still alive at the end of an action, though, and very satisfying it was, every face that was still there! It’s true the revolvers had nothing like the range you needed in a battle. Mostly good for mercy shots. I expect I used mine more on injured horses than anything else. I was glad enough to turn it in when I was finally demobbed. Do you still have yours?”

“Oh, yes. It’s in the glove compartment of Gabriel’s car at the moment. You use them in the country, you know, and though I’ve got a house in Milltown, my wife’s always at the Abbey helping my father and stepmother look after Lord Auldmon, so I have plenty of chances to take a pop at a rabbit in the kitchen garden or whatnot. Good to keep the eye in. I don’t think Aziraphale would have kept his, but it was actually shipped to him after he demobbed, and Gabriel wanted him to have it handy in case the bookshop was broken into.” He showed his gold teeth in a poor imitation of a smile. “Gabriel worries about his little brothers.”

“With good cause, apparently. We met a Sergeant Shadwell at the bookshop this morning. Was he Aziraphale’s sergeant, by any chance?”

“I believe so. He’s barking mad, I’m afraid. Sunshine attracts charity cases.”

“Gabriel said something like that about Joshua, also.”

“They were very much alike. Not so much to look at - Joshua resembled his mother - or even in temperament, but in their outlook on the world.”

“I see. Now, my chief purpose here is to put together, as nearly as possible, a picture of Joshua Fell’s last days upon the earth. What can you tell me?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. When we returned from church on Sunday morning -“

“Excuse me, we being who, exactly?”

“Gabriel, myself, my father Dr. M. Matthew Fell, and my wife Jane, who splits nursing duties for Lord Auldmon with my stepmother and Gabriel’s wife. Ruth was here in town visiting the children, who are much too noisy to live at the Abbey with an invalid, and my stepmother was sitting up with Lord Auldmon that morning. He has been bedridden and in a very fragile state for some years now.”

“I see. Pray continue.”

“The housekeeper told us that Master Joshua had called, asking to speak to his father, but the telephone doesn’t extend to his room, as he should have known. Joshua told Mrs Danvers that he was in London and should be expected at the Abbey sometime on Monday. This was rather inconvenient, but perfectly within his rights, and rooms are kept ready for all the family members at all times; but Gabriel and I had intended to leave in the morning in order to be in time for Mickey’s party, and now we felt we had to await his arrival.”

“Why, particularly? Had you some reason to be anxious to see him?”

“Not as such. You have to understand, sir - my uncle is very ill, and the household staff and the family at the Abbey are greatly reduced. Lord Auldmon’s mind is still sharp enough, and he sees Gabriel and me for business once or twice a week, but he tires very easily. We’ve had to forbid the servants from entering the sickroom because they disturb him too much. My father sees no other patients and lives at the Abbey in order to be on hand in a crisis. With Ruth in town, my wife and stepmother have their hands full.  And the L - Joshua was in many ways an agitating person. We felt that it would be rude to him, and possibly dangerous for my uncle, to allow him to rattle about the place on his own until such time as my father declared Lord Auldmon ready to see him. We reasoned that we would be able to catch up with him, at some point during the day he would either get in to see his father, or be persuaded that whatever business he wished to discuss would be equally well served by us as by Lord Auldmon, and we could all drive down to London together to attend the party.”

“Did he say in the call that he had business to discuss?”

“That was what Mrs Danvers reported to us. So we passed the time as well as we could in the morning, until he arrived, in time for luncheon, which we always take early.”

“Country hours, eh? Did he seem at all anxious or out of sorts? Apprehensive?”

“Not at all.  Though it had been some time since we’d seen him last - more than a year, in my case - he seemed exactly as usual. Which is to say, a little feckless and prone to excitement. It is always disappointing to see that he hasn’t grown up more, but after all, he was the baby of the family. We had a perfectly friendly and ordinary family meal, mostly discussing his father’s health and his own adventures in Europe. He seems to have become quite a virulent anti-Fascist. Afterward he wished to look in on Lord Auldmon, but when my father went in to see if he was up to a visit, he found him napping, and since he’d passed a restless night would not consider waking him. The afternoon being fine, Joshua took the air with Gabriel and me, and finally seemed to be getting closer to brass tacks, as he started discussing the future. We had...differences of opinion with him, concerning what that future should be.” Sandalphon’s face made something resembling an expression of disdain. “We have recently reduced his allowance and set conditions for its reinstatement to its former level which he expressed himself unwilling to meet. His counterproposals were - not practical.”

“Not practical, how?” Lamb asked, smelling family dissension.

Sandalphon shrugged one beefy shoulder. “He wished to make - well. He had ideas for certain foreign projects, which simply amounted to giving his money away willy-nilly with little to no hope of return. Bolt -  Gabriel - agreed with me. When he couldn’t budge either of us, he pointed out that Lord Auldmon was still the final arbiter and stormed off in a temper to put his proposals to him directly. When my father still refused to admit him to the sickroom he barged in anyway, but when he came out he appeared to be dissatisfied, and took himself off soon after, at about four o’clock, as I told you earlier.”

“So he drove down from town in the morning and then back to town in the afternoon?” Lamb whistled. “That’s a lot of motorbiking for one day!”

“It is. Joshua is - was - rather impulsive, and very healthy. He may have found the journeys tiresome, but I doubt he found them strenuous.”

“When I asked Gabriel whether he knew of any recent quarrels he said he didn’t.”

Sandalphon managed to look affronted without shifting more than one or two facial muscles. “I’d hardly call this a quarrel. He did rather lose his temper, but none of us did, even though he agitated Lord Auldmon a great deal, which was undoubtedly bad for him. My father went so far as to say that Joshua should be forbidden the house until he’s willing to apologize. My expectation is - was - that he would sulk for a day or two and then, once Sunshine’d had a chance to review his behavior with him, be suitably contrite and make amends.”

“I see. It might be helpful if you could be more specific about the projects he had in mind.”

“Since they were clearly never going to come to fruition, I made no particular note of them, but as I recall, one thing that figured largely was a scheme for obtaining visas and transportation for people in danger of arrest as undesirables in Germany, and providing them with homes and employment here.”

Lamb didn’t know what he had expected to hear, but it wasn’t that. “Very commendable.”

“Not, however, very sustainable, unless the higher echelons of commercial Jews were targeted, and that was not his intent, so the project would soon have run itself into difficulties. We have enough to do to keep the Estate and the family manufacturing concerns above water, and the local population gainfully employed, without giving jobs away wholesale to people their own country would prefer to do without.” Sandalphon managed a mirthless smile. “Meanwhile, Joshua once again dismissed our suggestions that it was past time he married, and refused point-blank to be introduced to any of the candidates we had in mind. Several of them were at the party last night, and we did manage to extract a promise, before he left, that he would attend that, but when he didn’t show up we assumed he was still feeling stubborn, and didn’t worry about it.” He sighed in resignation. “We should have, obviously, but the last place we would have looked for him was Westminster Bridge, so it wouldn’t have done any good. Gabriel and I were  late ourselves, around nine o’clock, I think.”

When Sandalphon went out, Abbot, who had been sitting quietly scribbling in his notebook, laid down his pencil and stretched his hand. “Cui bono seems to be the wrong question to ask this time,” he said. “As far as I can tell, nobody bonos at all, except Simple Saint Sunshine, who went to a war and never shot anybody. I suppose cherchez la femme is the next axiom to try. Gabriel Fell said there was no one, but with any luck Mrs Hostmassif will disagree. Women always know that sort of thing about a chap.”

“You’re in England. Speak English,” said Lamb, suppressing his amusement for the good of his assistant’s character. He’d heard both foreign phrases often enough in his professional career that he knew what the lad meant, but he wasn’t about to encourage him by letting on. Before he could command a translation and sensible discussion, however, the lady of the house entered the room, which suddenly seemed very full. 

She sat in her own occasional chair with an air of bestowing a great favor upon it and them, dismissed Abbot with a glance, and settled haughty ice-blue eyes on Inspector Lamb. “I’m not clear as to why you even wish to speak to me,” she said. “I have nothing whatever pertinent to tell you. I only discovered Joshua was in town when I spoke to Gabriel on the telephone on Sunday and he mentioned it. Everyone’s always happy to see the Lamb, so I called the shop, but there was no answer. I didn’t think it very likely that he’d want to attend a masquerade at such short notice, especially if he was running up to Lancashire the same day, but he’s always been possessed of an abundance of energy, and is rather good at throwing a character together from odds and ends at the last minute, so just in case I sent Miss Ligur over with an invitation. I understand she found the shop closed and slipped it through the mail slot.”

“Were you worried at all when none of your brothers arrived in time for dinner?”

She shrugged. “No. I had other things to think about. Bolt and Sandy’d had the courtesy to call and tell me they’d be late, and they said Joshua was in a temper, so I got on with my party and left the back door off the latch, so they could get in without troubling the servants.  I’d almost forgotten about them by the time I saw Bolt’s cowboy hat rising above everyone else’s headgear, after the fireworks.”

“I don’t suppose Joshua could have attended and you not recognized him in his costume?”

“I shouldn’t think so. He’d have come and spoken to me, and - “ She leaned forward slightly. “Most of my guests were my husband’s military connections, or friends of mine who work in the City.  Whatever he found to put on, it wouldn’t cover the beard, or the fact that he’s comparatively slight in stature, or the, well, his general approach to life.  When Joshua’s in a group like the people at the party last night, you know it.” She stopped, blinked. “Knew it.”

“Are you aware of anyone who had a particular quarrel with him?”

“I don’t think it was possible to quarrel with Joshua.” Mrs Hostmassif’s composure was sufficiently recovered to make the statement sound more definite than her wording implied. “My husband’s family, being military down to their bones, tried from time to time, when they encountered his attitude to war and the Empire in general. I’m afraid he was positively unpatriotic in some ways. But in the end, they simply couldn’t take him seriously enough, and in any case they hardly ever saw him and certainly didn’t last night.”

“Your brother and cousin seem to think Joshua had no women in his life. Would you agree?”

“Oh, no, there was no one. Not for lack of trying on our parts! Pater was always very anxious to see us settled, and there’s been a lot of pressure on him over the years, so I’m sure if he had anyone in view he wouldn’t have hesitated to tell us about her. Unless, I suppose, she was as poor as dirt, or a fallen woman, or something like that. Which, come to think of it, would not be unlike him.”

“What about his political connections? Your brother tells me he consorted with Bolsheviks and was very Anti-Fascist.”

“That’s certainly true, and I believe he used to go to meetings and take part in actions and things, but I was never privy to the details. It would surprise me if he had any active memberships in this country, he was such a rolling stone.” She made what in anyone else would have been a helpless gesture; from her, it looked more frustrated. “I wish I could be of more help.”

“As a matter of fact, there might be one way,” said Inspector Lamb. “Do you have a recent picture of the deceased? It could be of great assistance in helping to trace his movements.”

“I think I’ve got a snapshot somewhere. Miss Ligur will know where it is.”

Miss Ligur did know, and when summoned, produced a small picture, such as itinerant photographers sometimes take in hope of their target agreeing to pay for developing it, in order to receive a copy in the mail, showing a slender, cheerful young man at the Eiffel Tower, his triangular face emphasized by the beard. It struck Frank, comparing this picture to the relatives he’d met, that Joshua Fell resembled none of them, a greyhound among bulldogs. Yet he also looked a good deal more mature than he’d expected, based on the testimony so far. “How old was he?” He blurted out.

“Thirty-four, come Christmas,” said Mrs. Hostmassif.

“You all speak about him as if he were younger than that.”

“Well, he’s - he was the baby. Our Lamb. He needed to get married and settle down, but there should have been time for all that.” She looked suddenly uncomfortable. “I suppose thirty-three isn’t especially young. It certainly didn’t feel that way when I was that age. But there’s a dozen years between him and Gabriel, and we were all in school when he was born. By the time either he or Sunshine was old enough to play with, we were too old to play. Except for Raffles-and-Ruth, I suppose. That’s why the Lamb and Sunshine were so close. They shared the nursery while the rest of us were already half out into the world.”

“Raffles and Ruth would be your late brother and your sister-in-law?”

“Yes. Uncle Matt - that would be Sandy’s father, Dr. Fell - married his nurse, who was a widow, and Ruth is her daughter. She was very close in age to my second brother, and they were responsible for the youngest ones during school holidays.” She smiled an unexpectedly soft smile, startling on her stern face. “We called them Raffles-and-Ruth, because they were inseparable. She probably has a more realistic grasp of how old Joshua really is - was - than the rest of us do. He used to make a point of dropping in on her children when he was in town, too, even when he didn’t see any of the rest of us.”

“Is she here today?” Inspector Lamb asked. “I’d like to speak to her, to be thorough.”

“She’s upstairs - very upset, of course. She’s a little rundown from looking after Pater so much. By far the largest part of that falls upon her, you see - she was a professional nurse until she married Gabriel, while Jane only ever took the training, and her mother is much too old to do the heavy work any more. I keep telling them I’ll pay to get a professional nurse in, but Gabriel’s never been one to take advice. I don’t suppose she knows any more than I do, but I’ll see if she’s up to talking to you. If you’re done with me?”

They were. While they waited for Mrs Fell, Lamb stretched his legs a bit, and Abbot said: “It’s as if they’re all looking at him through the wrong end of the telescope. He was an anti-Fascist with schemes for getting politically endangered people out of Germany, who agitated somebody enough to put a bullet through his head, but to hear them, he’s an infant fresh out of the schoolroom.”

Inspector Lamb nodded. “No doubt they’ve got a blindspot about Aziraphale, too. I don’t mind telling you, Frank, I have a feeling that when we get hold of him, we’ll get a hold of this case all right. This lot haven’t been paying attention. It’s sad, when families come apart like this.” He thought of his own girls - good hearty girls, all great friends with each other - if, God forbid, anyone did for one of them, the survivors would have plenty to tell the investigation, probably including the name, address, motive, and method of the one that did it. Best not to think that way, though. It made his heart sink, and no one could possibly want to do his girls harm, so it was troubling trouble.

Gabriel opened the door and came in, driving half the air in the space before him, and dragging a thin, dark-haired woman in a serviceable gray skirt and blouse after him. “What’s this about you wanting to talk to my wife? I won’t have you harassing her. She’s very upset, and doesn’t know a thing about it.”

“Nevertheless, sir, you’ll oblige me if you step out,” said Lamb equably. “We have our ways of doing things. And if she doesn’t know anything she won’t be long.”

“I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have,” Ruth Fell said, in a small but clear voice. “ But I don’t think I can be much use. I didn’t even know he was back in England.” She had made no attempt to disguise the effects of a late night followed by a great grief. That the death of her brother-in-law had affected her was evident from the redness of her eyes and the pallor of her face. “Nobody’d mentioned it to me.”

“Nonsense! I’m sure I said something when he rang me up on Sunday.” Gabriel rested his hand on her shoulder.

“I was already in town on Sunday and we didn’t speak till you and Sandy turned up at the party on Monday.”

“Well, then, Mickey must have told you.”

“Mickey was preparing for her party and didn’t speak to me on any other subject all weekend. I was mostly with the children.” Ruth sniffed. “If I’d known, I would have rung him up at the bookshop and had him to dinner Sunday night. The children would have been so happy to see him. He’s very good at being an uncle.”

“Spoiled them rotten, you mean,” corrected Gabriel genially. “You see, Inspector, she hasn’t anything she can tell you.”

“There’s still question about associates and so on. Kindly step outside, Mr Fell. I won’t detain your wife long.”

Abbot stood up to usher him out.

“Okay, okay.” Gabriel turned his wife’s face to look up at him with one finger on her chin. “Sandy and I’ll be right outside, honey. Don’t be nervous.”

She bit her colorless lip and said: “I’m not.” 

Her husband squeezed her thin shoulder with his broad hand, and went out. Abbot shut the door firmly behind him, taking up his notebook and pen with a reassuring smile. 

“I’m really not nervous,” she said, pulling out her handkerchief. “Only I know so little about anything! And Gabriel does hover so.” She dabbed her eyes and nose, took a deep breath, and took her seat in the occasional chair, sitting up as straight as a witness in the box. “Very well, Inspector. Just don’t be disappointed when I don’t add anything substantial to your knowledge.”

“No question of that,” said Inspector Lamb, noticing that Gabriel’s absence seemed to have admitted considerably more air into the room. He’d met any number of unhappy wives in his career, and wasn’t pleased to see another one, but at least she’d stopped cringing as soon as her husband departed, which was a good sign for everyone.  Beaten women made bad sources and worse witnesses, always expecting a heavy hand out of nowhere. “Only I’ve often found that a husband and wife, who you’d swear held all their information in common, had different views on things, and different facts backing them up. It’s entirely possible that Joshua said things to you that he would never say to his brother, and you might know the name of someone who would make the entire case clear as glass. I understand you all grew up together?”

Mrs Fell nodded. “I was the first person to ever call Joshua the Lamb. My mother delivered him, and I was allowed to come in after he was washed. He had a full head of hair already, all curly, so I said he was a little black lamb, and it stuck. My stepfather’s surgery was in the village but we lived in Auldmon Abbey’s dower house, so after his wife died and he married my mother we all used to play together and have the same tutor. It was very jolly in those days - not like now, when it’s just my two, and everything has to be so quiet because of, because of Lord Auldmon’s illness. We were - the third brother, Raffles, Raphael and I - we were right in the middle, counted among the little ones when Sandy and Mickey and Gabriel were home from school, and as the big ones when they were gone, and I did love playing with the little ones! They were both so sweet, with just enough naughtiness about them to prove they were human. But then - well, we all grew up. The War, you know, and the influenza; but the War ended before Joshua would have joined up, and Raffles died, and, and - well, you remember all that! What I’m saying is, the War is like a, like a barrier, almost, and Joshua grew up on the other side of it. Everything was so different for him. We don’t, we didn’t know how to talk to him anymore.”

“So you didn’t correspond with him when he traveled?”

“Well - we did, but - we tend to bundle letters, you see. Either Gabriel writes for all of us, or we all include our letters in with his, to go to a mail drop, since he never had an intinerary. And Joshua would write to each of us individually, where ever he happened to be, but only use one envelope, and Gabriel or, or his father, while he was still, still up and about, would generally read them all out loud to us over breakfast. So even if he said different things to each of us, we all wound up with the same information.”

“I see. You attended your sister-in-law’s masquerade party?”

“Oh, yes. But Joshua never turned up.”

“So we’ve been told, but this is a large house, and I understand there was quite a crush, so it’s as well to be sure. Is it not possible that you merely missed him? Were there any other guests here acquainted with him?”

“I don’t think so. Mickey’s set isn’t - well, they aren’t the kind of people Joshua got acquainted with. But when he’s at one of Mickey’s parties, you know it. And he absolutely would have come to give me a kiss.”

“Would he have known you in costume?”

“Well - it’s true I was only a Columbine, and there were half a dozen there that last night. But - he would have found me. He would have called out for me, if nothing else.”

“When did you have contact with him last, then? In person, or on the telephone?”

“Oh, goodness, that must have been - let’s see - he didn’t come all the way home, but he was in town about a year ago, and we took the children to the Zoo. He and the children made up this wild story about the animals all getting out of their cages and putting the zookeepers into them, and charging to see them take their tea, it was very funny. And then we sat up late and were cozy, just him and me and a bottle of cognac. And - oh dear - excuse me -“ She sniffed and dabbed her eyes. “I’m so sorry. It just hit me that - I never saw him again. I never will. See him again.”

“So you’d say that at that time he was perfectly normal and not anxious or afraid of anything?” Lamb pressed gently when she had recovered.

“Not personally,” she said. “He was in rather a state about Hitler, very agitated about what his Chancellorship would mean to all the people the Nazis are so busy hating, Jews and gypsies and homosexuals and the subnormal. In fact he was still sporting some bruises he’d gotten from Brownshirts. But he was more invigorated about it than anything else, talking about the actions that could be taken against them, and we also talked about plays and the cinema and the children and, you know, normal things. He was in absolute raptures over an actress he’d met in Hamburg, playing in a little no-name theater, and I teased him about, about what the Family would say if he brought home an actress as a wife, and he said, ‘Never mind, you and Aziraphale will love her and everyone else can go hang.’”

Lamb perked up at that. “Did you get the impression he was serious about this woman?”

Mrs Fell frowned thoughtfully. “You know, I got the impression that he might have been? Her name came up rather often. But now I don’t even remember what it was, just how happy he looked when he talked about her. He never mentioned her in any of the letters he wrote to us since then, but that doesn’t signify, because I remember us agreeing that night, about the time we couldn’t pretend we weren’t tipsy, that if he ever did want to marry an actress, or a Jewess, or a Communist, or anyone like that, his best course of action would be to keep her a secret from everyone but Aziraphale, and not tell the rest of us until the deed was done, when he could show up with her on his arm and present us with a fait accompli.”

“I’ll add that to the topics to broach with Aziraphale when I finally meet him. I’m beginning to be very anxious to meet him. Do you know how long he was planning to stay in the country?”

“That varies from year to year. It’s his friend Crowley’s place, you see, and Crowley’s a solicitor, so his time isn’t really his own - but they value him highly enough that he can get away with a long weekend or a couple of days off mid-week now and again, and he’d rather work on Christmas Eve than not be available to take Aziraphale to the cottage on the Fifth of November.”

“When did you speak to him last?”

“Oh, let’s see. That would have been several weeks ago now. We had supper right before he took a short buying trip abroad, hoping to get some incunabula, but I never stay in town long at a time, because I need to take my turn, um, nursing Lo - Lord Auldmon, and I haven’t spoken to him since he got back. I would have expected Crowley to need to be in the office today, but for all I know they gave him the week. You had better inquire of them.”

“I don’t suppose you know where this cottage is, ma’am?” Lamb asked forlornly; for even learning that the “place” was a cottage was an advance in their knowledge.

“Somewhere in the South Downs, I think? I know Aziraphale has a funny story about sheep in the parlor. The whole point of the place is that it’s extremely remote and isolated.” Mrs Fell leaned forward, color rising in her cheeks. “Aziraphale was badly shell-shocked, you see. And Crowley’s the last of his school friends. I don’t think - my husband doesn’t like Crowley, he never did, and since the War - Gabriel was in Milltown during it, managing the factories. War production, you know. So he doesn’t really understand what it was like, over there, or how much they need to be right away from everyone and everything, together, sometimes. Until Crowley found this cottage, Aziraphale spent every Guy Fawkes’ Night trembling, and the next day he’d be all shamefaced about it. But now they motor down before and come back after, and Aziraphale’s all sunshine and smiles again, just like when we were children. I know, thinking like a policeman, and with so little else to go on, it must look - odd - that Joshua’s dead and Aziraphale’s apparently vanished off the face of the earth, but - it isn’t, really. He’s only doing what he needs to do to keep on being himself, and when he finds out what happened he’ll be devastated. You must be very careful how you break the news to him, or there’s no predicting the consequences.”

Inspector Lamb listened to this with interest and no little surprise, while Abbot’s hand fairly flew in the attempt for his pothooks and scribbles to keep pace with her. Her whole demeanor, posture, and complexion changed, the crimped waves in her hair fairly quivering with earnestness, and vigor imbued her face to a degree that he wouldn’t have believed possible, if it had not happened directly in front of him. “I’ll bear that in mind, Mrs Fell,” he said. “You were a nurse in the War, were you?”

“Why - yes.” She sounded surprised that he should know that, as if she hadn’t practically just told him so. “I served in the same hospital Raffles worked in. We got married right before we signed up, so there was never any difficulty about keeping us together. We worked the same wards and saw the same things, and - well. I didn’t nurse Aziraphale, but I nursed plenty of our boys in similar case, and I know how bad off he was. I’m very proud of how well he’s done. But there’s a reason he doesn’t go home anymore. Some things, the best way to cope with them is just - to avoid them.”

“Very true,” agreed Inspector Lamb, who had adopted this identical philosophy about certain relatives of whom his wife remained inexplicably fond. “I served, myself, and far be it from me to judge a fellow soldier harshly.  I hope your missing brother-in-law turns up safe and sound, and I hope he’ll be able to give us the lead that brings the killer to justice. I have no reason, based on anything I’ve heard so far, to think there’ll ever be a need to arrest him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Oh, not about that,” admitted Mrs Fell. “But I’ll, I’ll  feel better when I can see my children. They were at a children’s party last night, and knew we wouldn’t be home, but if I’m not there to tea - well. I’d rather be home in time for tea.”

“And very natural, too! Sometimes I come home from one of these cases and I do a head count, though I’ve no reason on earth to think anyone wishes harm to my girls. I think we’ve learned all we can here, ma’am, and I see no reason why you need to speak at the inquest or be bothered any further. Just ask your husband to step back in for a moment on your way out, and you can be off home.”

Mrs Fell smiled at him, a quietly pretty smile; but as she rose and went to the door the vibrancy went out of her and her cheeks faded, until by the time she told her waiting husband that he was wanted, she was once again a nonentity.

Gabriel returned, not alone, but backed by Sandalphon and Mrs Hostmassif as if by bodyguards. “Well, what now? Isn’t it time you went out and found the Communists that did this?”

“We’re progressing, sir,” said Inspector Lamb, not turning a hair, as the family was rather overdue to start accusing the police of incompetence and harassment. “We’ll be popping back to the Yard to see what the medical examination, the crime scene boys, and the area canvassers have turned up - for believe me, we aren’t the only ones on this hunt, by a long chalk. But the most likely place to find a clue is the bookshop, and if your brother isn’t back to let us in soon, we’ll have to ask you to do so. We can be sure Joshua made it that far because the motorbike was in front of it this morning, but did he meet the killer there? If he was abducted there may be signs of a struggle; if he wasn’t, there may still be clues in his luggage. So have you turned up those keys yet?”

“Sandy’s got them,” said Mrs Hostmassif. 

“No, I don’t,” said Sandy, not so much protesting as stating a fact. 

“You have all the keys to everything - you always do.”

“No, he doesn’t.” Gabriel contradicted her. “You won’t let him have the keys to this house, and you’ve got the Soho batch. I’m sure you do.”

“Why would I have them?”

“Probably because there’s no point in someone having emergency keys to the Soho properties unless they’re in town to use them in an emergency? I saw them in one of your desk drawers, I don’t know, last month some time. Last time I was here.”

“No, you didn’t!”

“Yes, I did!”

“There’s no harm to look, anyway,” said Sandalphon, his solicitor’s deadpan acquiring an overlay of human embarrassment. “We’ll find them, Inspector.”

--
“Well, what do you make of them, Abbot?” Inspector Lamb asked, as they left Richmond behind and headed for a small lunchroom on the Embankment, which specialized in hot lunches for hungry officers of the law who had not much time.

“I think they’ve closed ranks against us, but blessed if I can guess what they have to protect from us,” said Frank. “As far as I can tell there’s no reason for anyone to have killed this chap. Of course they could be lying about his will, or about what happened at Auldmon Abbey - but if you quarrel with a chap in the country, you don’t drag him all the way to London to throw him off a bridge. If he’d been murdered in Lancashire nobody’d know he was dead yet. And if there’s one person who won’t lie about what they know about a will, it’s the solicitor who drew it up. Yet we pressed up against a wall more than once, there.”

“Everybody has some secret or other they don’t want to see the light of day,” said Inspector Lamb. “It doesn’t have to have anything to do with the murder we’re interested in, but you’d be surprised what people will risk letting a killer go free in order to keep hidden. At least there’s no young lovers in the case. Young lovers protecting each other are the worst thing that can happen to an investigation! They’re all convinced we want nothing more than to arrest their innocent darlings and hang them on next to no evidence, and will lie themselves blue to stop us, when as often as not if they’d just speak truth and shame the devil the information they’re covering up is the very thing we need to clear their innocent darling and put us on the right track.”

“I don’t know - They’d hardly be young lovers, but I’m not sure Mrs Fell didn’t feel she’d remarried to the wrong brother-in-law, spilling all that about the mysterious Aziraphael.”

“A-Zir-A-Fail,” Inspector Lamb corrected him, trying and failing to reproduce Gabriel’s American accent. “The idea of sticking a name like that onto a baby! It’s child cruelty, it is. I hope he gets home before we have to suffer under one of the other Fells as a guide. I’m anxious to talk to him and no mistake.”

“I did have one idea, Inspector, though I daresay it’s all hogwash,” Frank ventured.

“Have you, by Jove! Out with it, lad - at this stage hogwash can’t be ruled out.”

“Should we check in with the Foreign Office about the deceased? As much time as he spent abroad, apparently hanging about with Communists and getting bruises from Nazis and plotting to play the Scarlet Pimpernel - it’s all a bit loud for an agent, I suppose, but he might have blundered into something and they might have a line on him.”

To Frank’s relief, the Inspector looked thoughtful. “On the one hand, it sounds a bit like a thriller; on the other hand, these are dangerous times and it’s not as if spies aren’t running around all over Europe. It can’t hurt to ask them, anyway.”

So ask they did, and answered they were not, leaving a message with a bored-sounding receptionist and diving into the reports on the Inspector’s desk while eating the slightly dry, but admirably warm, sandwiches the lunchroom had provided them. The examination of the deceased’s clothing had turned up nothing very useful except for a plain gold ring and a key fob that had both slipped through a hole in the pocket of the jacket and gotten lost in the lining. The ring was interesting, but not enlightening, on a single man resisting matrimony but dazzled by an actress.  The fob held a key to a motorbike, and three door keys, one of which was almost bound to belong to his brother’s shop. They would still need a Fell for form’s sake, to shield them from accusations of planting evidence, but this was a great relief to their minds all the same, as it was clear to them that no one in that family felt at all responsible for the safety of the bookshop or its contents, and their keys could easily be in Lancashire or at the bottom of the sea.

The medical examination of the body revealed no surprises. Death was caused by a single bullet wound to the head, entering at the base of the skull and exiting, with extreme prejudice, through the forehead, taking most of the face with it. Time of death was somewhere between eight Monday night and five o’clock Tuesday morning, which was not much of an improvement on “between dark and dawn,” but they must take what they could get. Toxicology scans were not back from the lab yet, so intoxication or drugging could not be ruled out, but the stomach was nearly empty, so the vector of any such intoxicants or drugs could be hard to pin down. Dusting the motorbike for fingerprints had turned up nothing usable, as predicted, and the crime scene men, with the aid of the local PC, had moved it out of the footpath. The neighborhood beat took about 45 minutes, so the bike could have been left any time after 9:30, at which point Bonfire Night festivities were in full swing, including an unauthorized firework show in the courtyard at about ten. 

A uniformed man had managed to locate Crowley’s manservant, one Cassius Erich, who had been very starchy, claiming only to know that Mr Crowley’s holiday cottage was somewhere in the South Downs and that it was not on the telephone. Mr Crowley was expected back sometime today but he could not undertake to say when. He was not in the habit of gossiping about Mr Crowley’s personal life or his friends. All he could say of Mr A.Z. Fell was that he was a highly respectable gentleman who had known Mr Crowley since before Erich entered his employ. Possibly Mr Fell had accompanied Mr Crowley to the South Downs; he could not undertake to say. He would give Mr Crowley the telephone number provided, but could not be responsible for his using it.

The policemen set to canvassing the street with the Eiffel Tower picture and those keeping an eye on comings and goings at the bookshop reported in at their shift changes, to no great purpose. No one had tried to get into the bookshop or shown any great interest in it. The old man - identified by the local PC as Robert Shadwell, who slept in the basement of the theater in return, apparently, for keeping trash out of the court and occasionally shouting at guests of Mrs Potts’s establishment - wandered about looking like thunder and had several long conversations with Mrs Potts, but this was a normal morning for him. Mrs Potts had emerged in a day dress with her hair triumphantly freed from its curlers shortly after Abbot and Lamb departed, and vanished round back toward the theater, which Inspector Lamb recalled was also a Fell property and made a note to add to the canvass. She had then accompanied a young lady not well known to the police to the flats above the bakeshop, and had thereafter fluttered into view occasionally, on innocuous business in the shops. No one questioned so far had noticed the young man in the picture over the last couple of days, which meant exactly nothing, as Shadwell’s and Mrs Potts’s reticence about Mr Aziraphale Fell’s doings demonstrated. “He’s the landlord of half of them, at least,” Inspector Lamb grumbled. “Are they going to risk sharing his family’s business with the police? I think not!”

Chapter Text

So Aziraphale concealed the Serpent in the sleeve of his robe, and as he bent over the manger, the infant Jesus looked up, and saw him, and smiled. The Serpent slipped from the sleeve to bury himself in the warm hay, and the other angels saw him not.

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

They rode in the same compartment as Doc (who must now be called Raffles), Fell Major (who must now be called Bolt), and Sandy (who was always going to be Sandy whatever anyone did.). “How many names do you toffs need?” Crowley asked, causing Angel to crinkle at him as the tall boys stowed all the luggage in the overhead racks, except for Crowley’s own little box, which he had already shoved out of sight underneath the seat.  “I’m not calling you Sunshine. Will they know who I mean if I say Angel?”

“Better call me Aziraphale, if you can manage that mouthful?” Angel sounded uncertain, like one offering an alternative that has been offered many times before, and always rejected, and his eyes were doing that thing they did, that made Crowley feel sure that someone somewhere (probably Fell Major or Sandy) needed short sheets on his bed and pepper in his tea.

“What mouthful? If your folks wanted to give you a hard name to say they should have gone with Nebuchadsnozzer. Or Jedididiadah. Or -“ He wracked his brains for some other difficult name he could mispronounce, but he’d already reduced Angel - Aziraphale - to giggles and driven the look away. The train lurched to a start, causing Bolt/Fell Major/Prefect and Prize Toffeenose Gabriel Fell IV to sit down abruptly on the box of sandwiches, to universal dismay.

Crowley, safely tucked between Aziraphale and the window, managed to conceal his smile at Bolt’s distress from everyone but Aziraphale, and throughout the sandwich triage and ineffectual trouser-rescue that followed kept himself small and quiet and obviously watching, not the reflection of all this activity in the glass, but the transition from station to the grubbier parts of town, to less grubby parts, to country: rolling fields and copses huddling under a gray and looming sky that might mean floods, or snow, but probably meant mere drizzling misty misery for Christmas. Which he was to spend in a great country house with his best chum’s family instead of  the rich dark daunting halls of the Prince Foundation, so he was ready enough to count his blessings in the approved manner. Especially when Bolt gave up on the prospect of removing mayonnaise from tweed with his handkerchief, and went through assorted gyrations, with Sandy blocking the door in anticipation of the conductor happening along at an inconvenient moment, to extract an alternative pair of trousers from the stored luggage and don them without further loss of dignity.

Aziraphale was given the task of repairing those sandwiches which could be repaired and making one wax paper bundle of the rest, on the grounds that he would be the one eating most of them anyway, and also the one who understood food construction best, after all those midnight kitchen raids. “After all,” Doc - Raffles - said, “they were only school sandwiches. They can’t have been made so much less indigestible, just by being sat on.”

“I’m sure Mrs Cottleston did her best,” said Aziraphale, placidly smearing mustard off of wax paper with a piece of bread, and tidying ham slices that had gone wandering back into their proper places. “She said she’d made sure we had plenty.”

“Of course she did. You’re her pet,” said Bolt. “She probably gave us the bread with the least sawdust.”

“Oh, everything tastes like sawdust to you,” sighed Raffles. “It’s no wonder cooks always hate you.”

“If we run short Crawly won’t mind having one that’s a bit of a mess,” said Sandy. “Not as if he ever stops to taste them.”

Crowley kept his eyes firmly on the horizon, feeling Aziraphale tense beside him. “Please, please, please, you lot, don’t call him that at home! Everybody else gets a home name. Why shouldn’t he?”

“Why should he? He’s not going home.” Crowley could see Sandy’s glare reflected in the glass, and pretended not to, casually scratching the back of his neck. Sandy shifted his shoulders and glared harder. He was convinced Crowley’d put the itching powder in his bed that time, but he’d never been able to prove it, because Crowley’d only put the idea into Digsby Major’s head and had never been anywhere near the Sixth Form corridor on the night in question.

“There’s nothing wrong with a good school nickname,” said Bolt, with his usual heartiness. “Stinky Grimthorpe-Hyde doesn’t mind his and it’s much worse than Crawly.”

“Stinky isn’t a charity boy,” said Raffles, hitting the nail on the head with his usual breathtaking lack of tact. “I’ll remind them, Sunshine, don’t upset yourself. What’d you bring to read?”

“The Return of Sherlock Holmes.” Aziraphale produced the book with hope in his eyes. 

“Eh, that’s tolerable,” said Bolt, filling the center of the compartment with his outstretched legs. “You may as well read us a story or two.”

Crowley stored the box of sandwiches next to his own luggage and Aziraphale wiggled himself into proper reading position. “The Empty House” and “The Norwood Builder” beguiled the time till it was reasonable to start eating the sandwiches and drinking the ginger beer, and then Bolt and (inevitably, for he always did what Bolt did) Sandy feigned sleep and Raffles crossed the compartment to sit on Aziraphale’s other side and listen to him try, and fail, to read a little more demurely through “The Dancing Men.” Aziraphale couldn’t help it - he always read aloud with gusto and different voices and at least once per story would get carried away and add in gestures, which as far as Crowley was concerned he should do far more often, and be less embarrassed and apologetic about afterward. He didn’t trust the oldest boys to be asleep until Sandy actually snored at the commencement of “The Solitary Cyclist,” which sent a ripple of laughter through the three who were awake, and provided the signal for Crowley to produce the packet of chocolate digestives he’d been hoarding since Mrs Cottleston pressed them into his hands and made him swear not to let Aziraphale share them out willy-nilly, in the wake of their collecting the sandwiches. By the beginning of “The Priory School” the starts and stops at little country stations awakened Bolt and Sandy and started a discussion among the older boys concerning times of arrival versus times of dusk and sunset and the distance to The Pond, and whether they would get the pony trap or the Machine, not one bit of which meant anything to Crowley or interested Aziraphale, so Raffles crossed the compartment again and Crowley and Aziraphale put their heads together over the pages, Aziraphale helpfully and surreptitiously trailing his finger along each line of print as he read it, to give Crowley a fighting chance of getting the word he heard and the mess of letters he saw to cooperate. 

They were only halfway through with “The Priory School,” though, when the conductor called “Auldmon!” and the train huffed and groaned and squealed to a stop at a platform, slightly smaller than the First Form Common Room, surrounded by what was probably a nice stand of trees in the summer but right now was only gaunt bare branches clawing at the sky. Crowley barely noticed these details, however, for behind the platform rested a motor car, with polished brass and sleek dark green panels and half-covered headlamps that gave it the appearance of a slightly befuddled predator. The driver, swathed in motoring coat and goggles, got leisurely out as the train stopped. Bolt whooped. “We have The Machine! Hurray! There’ll be plenty of time to check The Pond! Quick, get your things together!”

“If there’s plenty of time, I don’t see why we need to be quick,” said Crowley, too tired to be wise.

“You wouldn’t,” sneered Sandy, standing on tiptoe to pull down a suitcase, which he almost dropped on Aziraphale’s head; but Aziraphale’s hands flew up in time to catch it. The younger boys waited out the older ones before gathering their own things, and still made it to the door of the car before the conductor opened it and released them to dash onto the platform and pile cases on it for the driver to pack. 

Aziraphale objecting to Crowley being packed into the rumble seat with the luggage, he found himself gloriously situated beside the driver, Lesley, as they whirled through the countryside, and the village of Auldmon, and more countryside, and up the long drive, watching the operation of The Machine with avidity, and doing his best to query Lesley on every move he made, though it was by no means easy over the sound of the engine and the wind of their passing.

But then they drove up to the front of the house, and Crowley fell silent, for this was a house right out of a history book, with wings, and windows rising up to the sky. It was bigger than the Prince Foundation hall; it was bigger than the Orphanage; in all likelihood it was bigger than Buckingham Palace, and he did not belong here. He sat, frozen, as Lesley set the brake. The much-too-tall front door opened to let out a man in a tailcoat, a woman in a black dress, and four spaniels. 

Bolt, Raffles, and Sandy all hurled themselves out of the motor car as the spaniels hurled themselves down the steps. The dogs barked and wagged their tails. The boys shouted: “We’re off to check the Pond!” and wagged their arms before running off across the lawn. Lesley, without shutting off the motor, got out and opened the back door to let out Aziraphale. Assuming himself forgotten, Crowley slid under the steering wheel, resisting the urge to touch any of the intriguing devices he’d seen in operation, and out the opposite side just as Lesley turned round, reaching for the front passenger door. “I was going to let you out, young master.”

“Oh.” Crowley said. “I’m nobody’s master. Just Crowley.”

“I won’t be taking the bus out much,” said Lesley. “If you have a spare hour while you’re here, drop by the stable block and I’ll show you how she runs.”

“Really?!” Crowley’s face broke out all over grins, and he felt much better. “Wizard! Thank you, sir!” Aziraphale, who had heard the whole exchange, was grinning, too, and waiting for him with his hand extended. Crowley went to him and took it. “My box -“

“The footmen will get our things, don’t worry,” said Aziraphale, tugging him forward. “Merry Christmas, Mr Samuels! Merry Christmas, Mrs Device!”

“Merry Christmas, Master Aziraphale,” said the man in the tailcoat, his rigid face only softening at the corners of his eyes, but Mrs Device pulled him in and hugged him. 

“Merry Christmas, love! Come inside, before you catch your death of running all over the countryside in that contraption. The Lamb’s still in the schoolroom, but he should be down shortly, and your father’s gone to the Dower House, to be back for teatime with all that lot.” Smart young men in livery appeared to swarm over the car, empty it of luggage, and vanish again as the car drove off and they went inside to a tall, tiled hall, where Mrs Device divested them both of coats, caps, scarves, and gloves, and sized them - or their school clothes - up with shrewd gray eyes. “We’re short a couple of chambermaids and it’s a bit of a large houseparty this year, so we’ve made up the Little Room next to the Nursery for the both of you, if that’s all right?”

“That’s perfect!” Aziraphale beamed at her. “Sunshine” was an innately ridiculous nickname; but Aziraphale came by it honestly and Crowley would not argue that he didn’t. “Thank you! I’m going to show Crowley the library now, and then we’ll go straight up.”

“Mind you don’t stay long,” said Mr Samuels. “The master’s told me strictly not to light a fire in there till the guests come.”

“I know, he warned me, but thank you.” Aziraphale drew Crowley to a table where oil lamps clustered ready to be carried into the dim recesses of the house on this gloomy day. He lit one, which necessitated dropping Crowley’s hand; whereat Crowley immediately felt colder. “This way.” They went down a corridor thickly hung with paintings, passing a couple of heavy oak doors before pushing open one. “This is the best room in the house, of course, but we mustn’t stay long.”

The whole place was drafty, not much warmer than the school, but in the library the parquet was waxy with cold, and the boys crept in accompanied by a fog of their shared breaths. Crowley wished he still had his gloves and scarf on. “I can see where it’s too expensive to have a fire in every room,” he said, “but you’d think they’d build this one up when they know you’ll be home.”

“That’s exactly why they didn’t,” said Aziraphale, guiding him through the gloom. The curtains were drawn, and the lamp in his hand shivered, giving Crowley’s sense of direction no purchase on the shifting terrain of chairs, tables, bookshelves, and glass cases solidifying out of and fading away into darkness. “Pater thought I’d neglect you if I got to reading and that’s why he told Mr Samuels to leave it cold in here till we get some grownups who’ll want it.”

“How would reading to me be neglecting me?”

“Well, I, um, I never mentioned our reading sessions in my letters home, you see. I didn’t want them - they wouldn’t understand -“

Ah. “You didn’t want them to think I’m stupid.”

“Well, you’re not, and they would.” Aziraphale hunched his shoulders and shot him a sideways glance. “I mean, I’ve told them you’re the Prince Boy, and once Pater’s seen for himself how clever you are, maybe - but don’t worry, I know where all the jolliest books are kept and we can collect some to read in the room, as soon as I’ve shown you my book. It should be right - here we are!”

Aziraphale set the lamp down on top of a glass case like the one protecting the original charter and relics of the First Boys back at school, and stepped to one side to give Crowley the best position in front of it.

“Cor,” breathed Crowley, who had thought himself prepared, and wasn’t. Aziraphale had described his namesake book any number of times, and told some of the more interesting stories from it; but nothing in their shared vocabulary was adequate to convey the richness of the blues, reds, purples, golds, and greens on the pages lying open underneath the glass. On the right-hand page was a bewildering illegible mass of Latin calligraphy, each stroke, apart from the outsized and decorated capital at the head of the page, so uniform that the whole was surely impossible even for someone with normal sight and a grasp of the language to read, more like one of Gran’s knitting patterns than like text. An illustration monopolized the left-hand page, in an oddly flat but precise and gorgeous style like the stained glass windows in the school chapel. The central figure was clearly the Virgin Mary, in her blue veil and robes and clasped hands, leaning on a rock; but whereas the Archangel Gabriel took up most of the chapel window, apparently bellowing the news of her motherhood at the Virgin through a golden trumpet, the angel in the foreground here, white and gold under green blue cloak, patted her arm while another angel retreated into the sky, dressed in purple, wings spread between his body and the viewer, above the thatched roofs of a very British farm. 

“This was my mother’s favorite page,” sais Aziraphale, in the soft wistful voice with which he spoke of his mother. “That’s Mary of course - that was Mum’s name, too - and that’s the Archangel Gabriel flying away after announcing that she’s been chosen to bear the Messiah, and this is -“

“And that’s you,” said Crowley, touching the glass above the gold and white angel. “Disguised as a maid, though you’d think the wings peeking out of the cloak and the gold plate behind the head would be dead giveaways. But you always were a rotten liar, and I guess since she’s got the plate, too, she thinks it’s normal.”

Aziraphale tsked. “Don’t talk blasphemy! You know it’s not me.”

“I dunno, look at that face - all round, and the apple cheeks and the funny nose, and curls - naw, you’ve gotten better at hiding the wings and the halo, but I see through your disguise all right.” Crowley glanced up to enjoy Aziraphale’s put-upon expression, then down to enjoy the picture some more, and suddenly spied all the little black snakes, partially disguised as the outlines of figures, swarming all over the picture - curled around Angel Aziraphale’s ankle, peeking out from behind Mary’s praying rock, wriggling into the border to twine among the vines and apples and feathers and improbable flowers framing the scene, even coiled between Archangel Gabriel’s wings, blowing a trumpet-shaped flower with an expression more mocking than should reasonably have fit on such a tiny face. “And here’s me - Crawly the Snake!”

“Stop talking rot!”

“It’s all I can talk, you know that!” Crowley tried to lift the lid on the case, and found it locked. “Where’s the key? I want to see the picture of us in Eden - and the angel telling God he mislaid the sword he gave away - and rolling the rock away from the tomb - and the Serpent showing Jesus all the kingdoms of the world!”

“I know! I want to, too! But we can’t!”

“Why not, if it’s your book?”

“Well - it’s not, exactly. Not yet. It’s much too valuable to leave out for people to handle. It’s the only copy in the whole world. Hundreds of years old. Mum got Pater to put it specially into his will, that it will be mine when he dies. But even before then, when I’m a proper scholar, I can take it to Oxford to study and display in the library there, and we’ll photograph all the pages, and I’ll do a new translation, better than the old pamphlet my great-great-uncle wrote, and publish it with photographs so everyone can know about it and I’ll make my name. But until then it has to stay under glass so as not to be damaged. You’re shivering.”

“Am not-t-t.”

“Yes, you are! And no wonder, with it so cold in here and the car ride and no more fat on you than on whippet. Come along, let’s choose some books and -“

“Sunshine! Sunshine!” The shrill voice burst into the room slightly ahead of the small boy it belonged to, heedless of what furniture he ran into on his way to hurl himself upon Aziraphale, who caught him and swung him up and around before setting him down on a library stool which brought his head up to their height. “Are you looking at the book? I wanted to come down but Mr Cortese wouldn’t let me until I finished my task! But I’m done for the holidays now. Are you old enough to take the book out yet? I want to see the Flood and the Serpent holding the angel up and the rainbow!”

“I do, too, but we can’t do it for years and years yet, so for now we need to pick out some books to read in my room.”

“I have Robin Hood in the schoolroom!”

“Excellent, but we need to let Crowley pick some. Crowley - I would like to present my brother Joshua, alias The Lamb. Lamb, this is my very very best friend -“

“Crowley!” Joshua cried the name with such delight that Crowley, who had been feeling just a little - odd - at the sight of this juvenile barnacle seizing Aziraphale’s attention with no apparent intention of letting go, found himself grinning back and feeling that it wasn’t unreasonable to be expected to share Angel with a small brother he saw three times a year at most. “He talks about you and Grimsby in his letters all the time! Where’s Grimsby? Didn’t he come?”

“He had his own little brother and sisters to go see. Perhaps you’ll meet him another time.”

“Oh, all right! Crowley! Will you show me how to make a handkerchief rat?”

“Can’t make rats without fingers, and ours are likely to drop off,” said Crowley, sure his nails were splitting in the cold. “Lead on to the jolly books, so we can go find a fire.”

The jolly books that had been too nice to consign to the schoolroom, where books inevitably got battered, colored in, and worn to rags, were on the lowest shelves nearest the hearth, and they were very jolly indeed, so that Crowley had trouble picking. He hadn’t even heard of most of the Alcotts, and they wouldn’t have time for Aziraphale to read them all the Nesbits and Kiplings, and Joshua pawed the colored Fairy Books so eagerly only a rotter wouldn’t have pulled a couple, but the cold was getting into his bones, so he loaded them all up as fast as he could (Aziraphale grabbed another couple of his own choices when it seemed he shouldn’t have been able to hold any more, and held them in place with his chin) and they headed for the stairs with Joshua, the fastest, in the lead. He was almost up to the first landing, with Aziraphale and Crowley paused on the steps for Crowley to adjust his load before the middle ones slipped away from him, when the front door flew open and a tornado of boys and dogs, which seemed to have picked up some new members since it ditched them at the drive, came whirling in, centering on a pair of tall central figures who appeared to Crowley to be old and bald enough to have inhabited the manor when it was still consecrated as an abbey. “And there’s the last of them!” Said the taller, balder, broader old man. “Welcome home, Sunshine! And this’ll be your charity friend Crawly?”

Crowley barely had time to suppress his reaction to that final statement when Aziraphale, suddenly pale and slightly too loud, said: “Father, I would like to present my boon companion, A. J. Crowley. Crowley, this is my father, Michael Fell IV, Lord Auldmon of Auldmon Abbey. And, while we’re about it, my sister Michaela, my cousin Ruth, my uncle Dr Metatron Matthew Fell, and our dogs Grip, Holdem, Grab, and Lucy. And of course you know Raffles and Bolt and Sandy.”

“Ah,” said Lord Auldmon, with a smile that made his oldest son’s resemblance to him into something offputtingly obvious. “I stand corrected. Welcome to Auldmon Abbey, Mr Crowley. I hope you enjoy your stay. What on earth do you need so many books for, Sunshine? We’ll have guests, and the Pond will be bearing weight by tomorrow if the weather holds - you won’t have time to read through a tenth of that.”

“We, we don’t want to be going into the library all the time,” said Aziraphale, the color returning to his cheeks, but his voice primming itself up as if speaking to one of the schoolmasters or prefects. “So we got a good selection for, for reading to the Lamb.” Oh - his anxious wiggle was barely detectable in his head and shoulders, that was what was wrong.

“The Lamb’s old enough to be reading for himself. Mr Cortese reports that he’s made excellent progress.”

“Well, but I, I miss reading to him so -“

“Pleeease, Pater, don’t be difficult!” Joshua practically danced on the landing. “Of course I can read myself, but Sunshine reads so well!”

Lord Auldmon’s face softened a bit, but was still the face of a schoolmaster about to say no. “He does. It’s as good as a play,” said Crowley, with his very best wheedling manners on, taking an educated guess at how much cheek from a charity boy would amuse Aziraphale’s father without crossing the line into insolence. “He reads most of it, and I do the villain parts, and Grimsby does the ladies a treat, but we’re hoping the Lamb will consent to carry them for us. Otherwise I’ll have to do them, and they always come out Scots.”

“Oh, very well. I hope you’ve left the rest of us a thing or two to read.  Tea is in half an hour, so step lively.”

“Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!” Not waiting to be told twice, the boys headed up the stairs, Aziraphale’s steady climb masking, to the untutored eye, that he was holding himself to Crowley’s erratic pace, poised to catch his books if he dropped them, which Crowley was damned if he was going to do. The girls and the big boys clustered in the front hall, laughing and chattering, and only heading up when Crowley and Aziraphale were already on the second landing. By the time they reached the third and followed Joshua to the Little Room Next to the Nursery the others were already dispersing from the second landing, voices echoing off the corridors as they called back and forth about people and things Crowley neither knew nor cared about. 

“Here we are!” Joshua threw open the door. “The maids did all the work but I chose what things to put out and look! I drew you a picture.”

Crowley made a beeline for the hearth, where a good crackling fire was going full tilt, setting his load of books on the mantel to free his hands for warming. He looked around while Aziraphale exclaimed over Joshua’s picture, and started feeling overwhelmed again. When Mrs Device said The Little Room Next to the Nursery he’d pictured something like the posh version of a closet, with just room for a wardrobe and two beds piled with blankets and a washstand in between. This was - there was only one bed, but it stood higher than Joshua and was big enough for half a dozen boys if you tucked two of them in at the foot sideways. The rug on the floor was threadbare and no particular color, but that it was there at all boggled his mind. The curtains were dark blue and the walls pale green, with a frieze of something like an array of feather fans along the top. The room was so warm, with the door shut, that the window fogged with vapor. Pictures and shelves crowded the walls, the shelves bending slightly with the weight of toys and books, and Joshua and Aziraphale’s additional books from the library had been dropped onto two battered occasional tables, one each at the elbow of two armchairs, mismatched in size, style, and color, but so comfortable-looking Crowley was afraid to sit in one, lest he fall asleep and miss tea. The place smelled of mothballs, books, woodsmoke, and damp, so much like the smell of his Gran’s old rooms that it caught in his throat, and he had to distract himself by peeking under the bed, confirming that the pot there was painted with the same overblown roses as the basin and pitcher.

“Show it to Crowley. It’s obviously for him as much as for me,” said Aziraphale.

Joshua thrust a large sheet of watercolor paper in front of Crowley, who had to blink a few times to see what he was looking at. “Gosh, is this me?” All of the figures were wearing what were clearly intended as school uniforms; one  round with riotous curls in an improbable shade of yellow, another little more than an assortment of vertical lines with a vermilion shock of hair, and one shorter one with brown hair and books under his arm. In their midst was a much shorter figure, with a huge grin and dark curls. “And that’s Grimsby, and Aziraphale, and you - this is all of us when you come to school in a few years, isn’t it?”

“Yes!” Joshua’s hands darted in to point out other details. “And up here -“

“That’s the BVM - no, stupid me, that’s your mum and the Angel Aziraphale,” said Crowley; and really the Lamb had done a creditable job, for his age, of copying the Blessed Virgin Mary and angel from the book in the library, but the BVM would hardly be wearing a garden hat, gloves, and button boots. “Keeping an eye on the lot of us.”

“That’s right!” Joshua performed a more violent iteration of Angel’s happy wiggle. “I’m sorry yours doesn’t look more like you.”

“I think it’s a very creditable likeness, given that you had nothing to work with but what I said about him,” said Aziraphale, opening drawers in various pieces of furniture (washstand, tables, a wardrobe - even the mantelpiece clock had a fussy little drawer in the base) until he found a couple of drawing pins.  “I’ll pin this to the mantel, and you’d better wash your face and hands. We haven’t much time before tea.”

“I can’t hold the pitcher! It’s too big!”

Crowley flexed his knuckles, hearing them pop, and rubbed the pins and needles out of them. “I’ll pour for you,” he volunteered. The pitcher, to his surprise, was warm to the touch - had the servants really troubled themselves to bring hot water all the way upstairs while they were in the library? He’d known toffs had things good, but he’d no idea they had it this good. The tightness in his chest warred with the comfortable Gran-smell of the room, an equal contest that was making him uneasy in his stomach. He and Joshua scrubbed their hands as Aziraphale, his tongue poking out of the side of his mouth, pinned the picture precisely in the center of the mantelpiece. Crowley got a small shock as Joshua drew his hands out of the basin. “Here, now, what’ve you done to yourself?” He seized the small damp hands and examined them in the light from the window.

The Lamb writhed out of his grip. “It’s nothing! They’re always like that!”

“Nothing my eye! It looks like you’ve been punching holes in yourself!” In the center of each palm was a round, reddish mark, with a fainter corresponding mark on the back.

“It’s just his stigmata,” said Aziraphale. “He’s Jesus in disguise, you see.”

“Oh, I am not!” Joshua dried his hands vigorously and threw the towel in Crowley’s face. “They’re birthmarks, that’s all.” He picked up a comb and started a valiant struggle with his hair. Every stroke of the comb seemed to make things worse, so Crowley took the comb in one hand and the Lamb in the other and ruthlessly sorted him out while Aziraphale washed his hands and put his own curls in order with practiced resignation.

Tea went better than Crowley had expected, taken in the drawing room with Michaela (aka Mickey, with a mien as determinedly serious as Gabriel’s was relentlessly hearty) acting as hostess and pouring, and Ruth (Sandy’s stepsister, as unlike him as anyone could wish) supporting her.  Dr Fell and Lord Auldmon talked boring grownup talk, showing no sign of missing Mrs Dr Fell (“Under the weather,” said her learned husband dismissively, as if the room were not full of people who had lost mothers) and taking minimal notice of their own children, much less the charity boy in their midst. Ruth and Raffles, being much the same age, compared school gossip. Bolt, Mickey, and Sandy talked with much animation about skating, the expected visitors, and the anticipated trip to Europe Mrs Dr Fell was to take them on once they left school after next term. 

This left Mr Cortese the tutor - a man who seemed to be forcing himself to frown, but whose eyes betrayed him - to ride herd on Joshua’s excitement and grill Aziraphale and Crowley about their lessons, relationships with the masters, and so on. He was obviously sizing up Crowley, and Crowley put on his best dining-with-the-trustees manners and sized him up right back, remembering that he had, in his time, caned Aziraphale and suffered the consequences. He was one of those grownups who would have been jolly enough, had he dared, but wasn’t sure he was allowed to, and did not trust his own authority enough to give himself permission. In any case, Aziraphale had him eating out of his hand, letting him get the apparently obligatory school questions out of the way and then inquiring whether he was staying for the house party or visiting Mr Harrison again, and from then it was all right, for Mr Cortese was in fact to join his particular friend on his houseboat in the Lake District and pass an agreeable bachelor Christmas together. It sounded cold and cheerless enough to Crowley, but there was no accounting for grownups and once he was allowed to tell a few stories about past Christmases the tutor relaxed enough to stop cutting the Lamb short and instead drink tea and smile at the resulting conversation. The tea itself was very good, better than he’d ever had, anywhere, even at the Prince Foundation, the bread and butter sliced a bit thin, but the scones hot and the tea strong.

After tea, the Lamb asserted ownership of his older siblings, and though Mickey and Bolt retreated to the billiard room with Sandy, Raffles-and-Ruth (who appeared to come as a unit, now they were together) were readily coaxed up to the top of the house, to indulge the youngest among them with all the games he cared to play. Crowley had never seen the Doc so affable, and Ruth, once out from under the grown up’s eyes, proved to be a jolly good sort. The Lamb, not surprisingly, got only more excited as the afternoon passed on, from hide-and-seek to Snakes and Ladders, and Ruth was nearly as good at gently reining him in when he got too wound up as Aziraphale was. 

Supper - absurdly late, in a dining room with a fire at either end and attended by two gorgeously-attired footmen - was a bit of an ordeal, but Crowley’s Prince training stood him in good stead, and seated with Ruth on one side and Aziraphale on the other, in the only formal suit he owned, he felt that he at least acquitted himself better than Joshua did. Born to it or not, the Lamb was really too young to be sitting up so late, with the result that he fell asleep in his fish and was carried out, by Mr Samuels, to go up to the nursery. “And that,” said Lord Auldmon, addressing the entire table, “should put paid to his agitating to sup with the house party this week.”

“It hardly seems fair the poor kid should eat in the nursery all alone,” said Bolt. “But if he’s not up to it, he’s not.”

“Crowley and I aren’t so old and dignified we couldn’t bear him company,” said Aziraphale, in a hopeful voice. “Are we, Crowley?”

“Not a bit,” said Crowley, who had in fact been dreading having to sit up straight and nibble his way through six courses every evening.

“I’d think you’d be thrilled to dine properly, Sunshine,” said Bolt. “We all know how you love to eat, and the best dishes don’t get sent to the nursery.”

“Yes, well, I can’t help thinking I’m still a bit young for it,” said Aziraphale, in his stuffy grownup voice. “You and Mickey and Raffles were all much older when you were my age.”

Lord Auldmon made a sound that Crowley realized, after a lapse of a heartbeat or so, was more or less a laugh. It wasn’t very practiced, and cut itself short.

“The circumstances were different,” said Michaela, an unanticipated ally, addressing herself to Lord Auldmon. “After Lady Mary died you needed a hostess and I could hardly sit up while Bolt ate in the nursery. And if Raffles ate in the schoolroom he’d dissect his entree and upset Sunshine explaining its anatomy. But none of my friends at school ate in the dining room at that age.”

“Very well, you two can revert to the nursery most nights,” conceded Lord Auldmon. “If the weather holds good we’ll have you too tired to last past the soup, in any case. But I shall need you to manage your grandparents on Christmas Day, Sunshine, or they’ll be at daggers drawn with the American branch over the nuts.”

That settled, no one paid any attention to them anymore, except for the footmen serving them, who kept slipping Aziraphale the best bits of every course while pretending to pay no attention at all. “The American branch?” Crowley asked.

“The first Lady Fell’s family,” explained Aziraphale. “Bolt, Mickey, and Raffles’s grandparents. They’re usually in America over the holidays but this year they’ve come to do something businessy with the mills - they still own part shares or something, it’s monumentally dull. They probably won’t notice you at all, but if they do, call them sir or ma’am, or Mr and Mrs Vanderburg, and use as few words as possible to answer their question. Whereas Mum’s mother and father live in London and come up once in awhile to see the Lamb and me, and are very jolly and nice - to us. The trouble is, each of them thinks the other is horribly low, because of course the Vanderburgs are in trade, but Mum’s family, the Sturgeon-Prices, are property owners; but the properties include some theaters and aren’t in the best parts of London, so the Vanderburgs say they’re slumlords, and if they’re allowed to get their knives into each other, well, it’s just easier for everyone if I can get mine talking about Mum, because once they start on that they won’t hear anything the Vanderburgs say.”

“I see,” said Crowley. “Your whole family’s a bit of a muddle, isn’t it?” But at least he had one. “What do I call your Sturgeon-Prices, then?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never introduced them to a friend before.” Aziraphale wiggled happily, and the footmen were nowhere near bringing out another dish, which forced Crowley to believe that introducing them to Crowley was a happy-wiggle-worthy prospect, which made him feel strange all over and eat his roast beef too fast.

(“Invited to Auldmon Abbey, well, well!” Old Mr Prince, seated in a wing chair, regarded Crowley, standing upright on the hearth, with a faintly mocking air. “And why do you want to go there, instead of spending your Christmas here, among your peers? With my son and me?”

“You told me to make connections,” said Crowley, trying to sound as if he didn’t care much. “The Fells seem like good ones. It sounds like a jolly time. And when Angel shares out a box from home, the buns are even better than the ones here. If you’d rather I stay here I’m sure I’ll have a good time, too, but I’m already connected here.”

Old Mr Prince laughed. “So you are. Go, then; and be sure you get your share of buns.”)

When the ladies - as no one seemed even mildly amused at calling Ruth and Mickey - retired to the drawing room, Crowley and Aziraphale were dismissed upstairs, and ready enough they were to go, too. They had both eaten more than they should. Learning to pace himself at these dinners after a lifetime of inhaling food as fast as possible before someone else could get it would take Crowley some time, and if Aziraphale had the knack of ceasing to eat something he enjoyed, he had apparently lost it toiling over the coarse, dull food at school. On their way up the stairs they discussed which book to read from, and whether this was a good opportunity to explore the sliding possibilities of the uncarpeted hall on the top floor. 

In the event, their evening occupation was decided for them, for they entered the Little Room off the Nursery to find the Lamb, fully awake again, clutching the Violet Fairy Book to his chest in the center of the bed. So they sat up, with Aziraphale reading and Crowley teaching Joshua to make a rat handkerchief, until Mr Cortese stuck his head in to tell them it was time to bathe and go to bed. At this point he should have sternly marched the Lamb back to his own bed in the nursery, but instead he allowed as how there was plenty of room, and if the big boys didn’t mind it was certainly no skin off of his back if the Lamb stayed all night. Which he did, snuggled down between them with his feet in Crowley’s stomach and his head in Aziraphale bosom, and Crowley fell asleep feeling, as he had not felt since Gran died, that whatever tomorrow held, tonight he was in a pretty good place.

--
On the whole, the holidays at Auldmon Abbey were jolly with sudden abrupt intrusions of strange, for Crowley; but he was almost always with Aziraphale, and as often as not with the Lamb, which cushioned the strangeness a lot. The guests who came and went during the period were almost all grownups. The ones who weren’t were great boys and girls who for the most part regarded the younger ones with benign contempt and left them to their own devices. Mickey wasn’t interested in her youngest brothers and Crowley at all; Sandy and Bolt were content to ignore them or even pretend to be kind in the presence of anyone else; and quite a few opportunities for humiliation went by unexploited.

All was not perfect. The Pond did indeed freeze, and Crowley’s first attempt to skate (in borrowed skates) was so disastrous that Joshua flew into a rage and assaulted those who laughed the loudest, till Aziraphale had to carry him back to the house kicking and screaming, with Crowley limping along behind him carrying the skates. Joshua was willing to take a whipping (from his father, Mr Cortese having departed on the same train that brought the first guests) rather than apologize, a prospect that made Aziraphale so sick and pale that Crowley set aside all his own feelings in the matter in order to approach the offended laughers, acknowledging freely that he knew he must have looked funny skating with his legs going in opposite directions like that ha ha and no harm done, but that Joshua was too little to understand and seemed to consider the honor of his house assaulted or something - which led to them coming up to the nursery for a formal apology, to Crowley, enabling Joshua to calm down and apologize to them in the nick of time. It all ended with the ladies in the small group kissing him and the men telling him he was dead game and shaking Crowley’s hand before trooping back downstairs to play billiards.

“I ought to whip you anyway,” said Lord Auldmon, still holding the cane, when Crowley had closed the door behind the last of them. He looked down at his youngest with a peculiar expression on his face. “You get away with far too much. Everyone says you’re spoiled, and everyone’s right.”

Joshua looked up at him with molten dark eyes, and mutely bent over.

“You said you wouldn’t if he apologized,” said Aziraphale. “He met the conditions. Please, Pater!”

Lord Auldmon hung the cane back on its hook on the wall. “Of course I must keep my word, but don’t think you can go setting counter conditions to my conditions and weasel out of legitimate punishment on a technicality as a regular thing.”

“They shouldn’t have made fun of Crowley,” said Joshua.

“I’m used to it,” said Crowley, leaning against the wall feeling awkward.

“That doesn’t make it right,” said Aziraphale.

“And running at a guest head-down and pushing them over in the middle of all those blades wasn’t the way to make anything better. It was dangerous. Also, they’re your elders and my guests and it’s not the part of children to judge adults. You didn’t see Aziraphale losing his temper, did you?” Lord Auldmon ruffled the Lamb’s hair and took a step back. “Stay in and think about it the rest of the day. As for you -“ He turned abruptly to Aziraphale, who didn’t exactly flinch, but snapped into the alert stance with which he faced the schoolmasters. “Why on earth didn’t you say Crowley was too lame to skate? I wouldn’t have made a point of dragging you two out there if you had.”

“He’s not!” 

“Just because my legs don’t work like other people’s doesn’t make me lame!”

The two boys spoke at once, and it was like being at school; except that this was no intermediate power they faced. Aziraphale wasn’t afraid of the masters; he was afraid of what the masters would report to this man, right here, the mainspring of the authority he answered to, and Crowley’d be damned if he faced up to him alone. “I was a champion sslider when the sstreetss icced in Edinbro,” he went on, hearing the Scots and the lisp sneak back into his mouth, but this was no time to speak slowly, “but nobody wantss to sstrap knives to orphanss’ feet and turn them loosse, do they? I dinna ken how I’ll have to move to sstay up on sskates, but I ken it willnae be the ssame way Aziraphale moves on them because my hipss won’t do that.”

“Crowley can always work out how to do things if left alone to do it, but nobody could be expected to learn in half-an-hour, in front of all those people and being laughed at! We did say we’d prefer not to go out with the rest of the skating party,” said Aziraphale. “You didn’t give us a chance to explain why.”

“I had no reason to think it was anything beyond your general reluctance to do anything except eat and read,” said Lord Auldmon. His face was unreadable, Aziraphale’s mulish in the way that meant he was a seething mass of nerves inside, and Joshua looked like he was getting worked up again. Crowley tried to think of something useful to say, but before he could settle on anything, Lord Auldmon made an exasperated sound. “A failure of judgement on my part, apparently. Now that I have all the information, I expect you to take every opportunity to get out on The Pond and teach your guest to skate well enough to participate in the next large skating party.”

“Very well, sir, we shall do so.”

“If the iccce holds,” said Crowley.

Lord Auldmon looked at him long enough to be uncomfortable. “If the ice holds, obviously,” he agreed. “Do the masters at school let you get away with that sort of cheek?”

“It’s nae cheek, it’ss a reasonable caveat,” said Crowley, throwing some posh vocabulary in to slow his speech down. “And no, they don’t. I’ve been caned for it. Yet somehow, I continue to come out with reasonable caveats when the converssation warrantss them.”

Lord Auldmon nodded, as if this confirmed something he’d been thinking. “You will all stay up here for the rest of the morning and the kitchen will send up a tray for your luncheon. We all know that isn’t a punishment for Sunshine, anyhow. But please try to participate more harmoniously in the future.” 

So they were able to spend the day happily and warmly indoors, getting through the entirety of Five Children and It and trying out the hall as a slide at last; but for the next few days rose before breakfast and shivered their way out to The Pond, with Raffles-and-Ruth (who counted as a single person and knew lifesaving, in case the ice broke) but mostly on their own, to stand and fall and slide and demonstrate and imitate, until Crowley worked out the best way to stay upright and make forward progress on skates.

Apart from this, they hardly saw Lord Auldmon, who was very busy indeed, doing business in the study at all hours while still making time for his adult guests, and once, with Bolt, going all the way into Milltown to preside over a Christmas dinner for the workers at his factories. Which would, Aziraphale explained, be Bolt’s factories after he got back from the American university he was to start at after his European jaunt, since they all came from his mother’s side. Just as “the Soho properties” would be Aziraphale’s, when he came of age. “I thought you were supposed to be a Don,” said Crowley.

“I’ll have to do both, at least until the Lamb comes of age, too,” said Aziraphale. “Right now there’s cousins doing most of the managing, but of course a few flats, shops, and a theater don’t require nearly as much management as factories do. Pater’s got the final responsibility for everything right now, which is why he’s so busy all the time.”

“Seems like a lot of work, being a Fell,” said Crowley.

“Oh, it is! You’ve no idea. Nobody does! All the other boys, they’ll inherit their father’s estates and their mother’s incomes, or go into the family business, or the Army, or a profession, and that will be that. But Pater believes in diversification, so that if one source of income has a bad year the others can compensate. It’s all beastly dull.”

“Then stop talking about it and let me sleep,” said Joshua, snuggled between them, for they had this conversation in bed at night.

“Nice and quiet in the nursery,” Crowley pointed out.

“S’cold there. I like it here. Only you lot need to shut up.”

The servants had easily been persuaded to let the nursery fire lapse at night in favor of serving only the Little Room, and the boys nested there comfortably, for the most part, reading Joshua to sleep and then lying awake talking till Crowley slept, too. Aziraphale was always the last to fall asleep, generally reading - they had, after all, plenty of books to hand - until the lamp ran out of oil or he couldn’t keep his eyes open. Tonight, however, was Christmas Eve. Joshua was much too excited to sleep for long at a time, and once he was awake, his best efforts to amuse himself without waking the older boys always failed. They sang Christmas carols softly together, and Aziraphale told a peculiar version of the Christmas story, involving the Serpent of Eden hiding in the manger because he wanted to see the Son of God, too, and Angel Aziraphale (who was remarkably chummy with the demonic Serpent in all the stories Aziraphale told about them) smuggling him in and out from under the noses of the other angels in attendance so that they wouldn’t smite him. They might have gotten a full eight hours kip among the lot of them when Joshua roused them for good, when the window was still dark but the clock on the mantel declared it Christmas morning, by leaping on them both with cold feet and hands, bouncing as he chanted: “Wake up wake up wake up! Father Christmas came to the nursery and I can finally give you your present! Wake up wake up wake up!”

“Merry Christmas to you, too, brat.” Crowley rubbed his eyes as Aziraphale lit a candle, the lamp having been entirely depleted of oil last night. “Father Christmas doesn’t come for orphans and I didn’t get anybody presents, so I don’t have to wake up.”

“Didn’t you?” Aziraphale asked, striking a match and setting it to the wick of the candle on the nightstand. “Not for anybody? Where’d this come from, then?” He pulled a flat rectangle of tissue out from under the pile of pillows.

Botheration! Crowley’d meant to nip that onto the tree in the nursery while Aziraphale got dressed that morning. “I dunno, do I? Must’ve been Father Christmas,” he grumbled, pulling a couple of pillows over his head.

Aziraphale pulled the pillows off, easily overcoming Crowley’s attempts to hang onto them. “I’ve seen Father Christmas’s handwriting. It bears a remarkable resemblance to Pater’s. This, however, is addressed to A, with wings on, in a hand very much like yours.”

“Never mind that! Open mine first!” Joshua thrust a larger flat package at him; but Aziraphale was blithely picking open the first - could you call it a parcel, when it was so small?

“Patience is a virtue. I’ll open yours in a moment. Here we go - oh! Crowley, my dear boy, have a look at the wizard bookmark Father Christmas left me!”

Crowley burned with embarrassment; but the Prince Foundation had not allotted him enough pocket money to buy a whole book, even had he been able to locate one Angel didn’t already own. Small and inadequate as it was in comparison with everything else Aziraphale had in his life, though, the bookmark had come out fairly well, the Serpent hissing “Ssstop Reading and Go to Sssleep” on one side, and an angel on a stack of books, reading by the light of his halo, with the words “Just one more chapter” emerging from his mouth on the other. Drawing had been the easy part - writing as near to printing as he could had given him an ache in his hand he could still feel when he looked at it, and Grimsby’d had to do half of it. “Yeah, s’all right I guess,” he said. “Just don’t lose this one.”

“It’s not from Father Christmas, it’s from Crowley. Anybody can see that,” Joshua corrected. “Now mine, mine, mine!”

“All right, all right.” Aziraphale slowed down his unwrapping, carefully untying the ribbon, smoothing it, and laying aside before tackling the paper, which he undid fold by fold, until Crowley had to pin the Lamb’s arms to prevent him from ripping the paper off, himself. The end result didn’t look worth all this production, to Crowley, when it was finally revealed - an ordinary exercise book, albeit with fancy lettering on the front. Then Aziraphale gasped, and held it under the lamp, so that Crowley could see the words The Book of the Angel Aziraphale stenciled and painted in gold. “Lamb - oh, Lamb, did you really -?” He turned to the first page, where letters jumped and danced in the candlelight before settling down into legibility, a sprawling hand struggling to constrain itself to the ruled lines on the page: In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth, and built upon the Earth a Garden, called Eden, where dwelt Adam and Eve and all the creatures of the Earth and sky, in peace and harmony.

“Mr Cortese helped,” said Joshua. “He kept the pamphlet locked up and wouldn’t let me touch it, because he says it’s almost as fragile as the real book by now; but every day instead of penmanship we did a little, ever since you left for school. It was my idea, because it isn’t fair, when it’s your book, that you had to go to school without either it or the pamphlet to read; and Mr Cortese said if I finished it by the holidays he’d give me full marks for penmanship and he won’t give me any more boring lines to write for practice. He helped me fix the spelling, too. The writing gets neater as you go, and I put in some pictures, but only little ones in colored pencil. This was what I was finishing up when you got here and Mr Cortese wrapped it up and hid it behind the exercise clubs in the schoolroom cupboard so you wouldn’t find it.”

Aziraphale was blinking. “Oh, Lamb,” he said. “You did all this - ? But - oh, my goodness, this was so much work -!”

“Wait, you copied out that whole translation your ever-so-great uncle made?” Crowley asked. “The one he’s been telling us the stories out of?”

Joshua nodded, fairly bursting with pride. “Parts of it were wicked hard but it’s hardly blotted at all. And, um, I spilled some watercolor and I didn’t get it on the book but we had one of the scullery cats in because there were mice and while we were getting the rags to mop it up she walked through it and then she walked on the page I was about to start so there’s cat tracks under the words to the story about the Flood. But you can hardly notice it.”

Aziraphale was still blinking, biting his lip and smiling as he scanned the pages. “This is so lovely! Thank you! And I won’t lose my new bookmark because it’s only ever going to hold my place in this book.”

“Good on you, Lamb, upstaging Father Christmas and everybody,” said Crowley. “Nobody’ll be able to top that.”

Nobody did, though Crowley felt very happy when Aziraphale gave him the jackknife he’d been pretending not to covet ever since he’d first spied it in the ironmonger’s window on the way to church one morning in October. Joshua’s reaction to the spinning top that Crowley and Aziraphale had combined their pocket money to get for him was highly gratifying. “Father Christmas” had left mostly sweets, nuts, oranges, and Christmas crackers in the stockings in the nursery. The big presents were all hung from the big tree in the Library, and no one was allowed to even open those doors until the entire household had first gone to the village church a mile away (bundled up in the motor car and the pony trap and a large old fashioned coach that was only ever hitched up for occasions like this, to carry the children and the servants who weren’t up to making the walk), sat through the service, come back, changed to slightly less posh clothes, and finally eaten breakfast, which they all ate together, and opened the small personal presents stacked beside their plates. Even Crowley had some, mostly a dull stack of penwipers and handkerchiefs and so on. He gritted his teeth internally and thanked each giver with careful politeness, only letting the sneer peek out of the corner of his mouth very slightly when thanking Bolt and Sandy for their generous contribution of a school cap and tie to the upkeep of the charity boy. Aziraphale got disappointingly few new books, but Joshua got a clockwork lamb that he promptly set marching up and down the tablecloth, which at least kept him from combusting before the Library doors were opened. 

The ceremony of taking down and handing out presents to everyone from Lord Auldmon to the housekeeper’s granddaughter was dull in the extreme, though the tree itself - which the servants must have been up half the night decorating - put every Christmas tree Crowley’d seen in his life in the shade. The presents were along the lines of gloves and music boxes and jewelry, finely calibrated to the status of the recipient. Crowley was nonplused to receive a cricket bat. It could, however, have plenty of other uses besides batting cricket balls, and by the standards of people like the older Fells it was certainly generous. Aziraphale’s present of a foil, however, was so baffling the Angel almost muffed his show of gratitude. When Joshua and Mrs Device’s granddaughter finally received the gigantic hoops that had lurked in the upper branches, taunting them, till their turns came, the children were released into the open air, and Crowley and Aziraphale, having shown the Lamb and little Anathema Device how to get their hoops rolling round and round the drive, were free to head for the stables, where Lesley had agreed to meet them and demonstrate the functions of the motor car.

This passed the rest of Christmas morning pleasantly enough, with Crowley allowed to sit in the driver’s seat (his legs were already long enough to reach everything they would need to reach to drive it, and the peculiarities of his joints more a help than a hindrance in dealing with the clutch) and go through all the necessary motions, while Aziraphale - less enchanted by the intricacies of motor operation - paid a visit to all the horses and renewed his acquaintance with the groom and the old coachman, holding court beside the grate in the equipment room predicting the early demise of the motoring fad. Only the onset of a light and fluffy snow prevented Crowley from talking Lesley into allowing him to drive The Machine on a very slow and cautious circuit of the paved stableyard. “Probably shouldn’t do it anyway, without Lord Auldmon’s permission,” Lesley remarked, as an afterthought. “Getting colder now. You boys had better go back to the house, so as not to be late washing up for Christmas dinner.”

“We can shortcut through the west wing and not disturb any guests,” said Aziraphale.

“That you can’t, for it’s locked up tight. The roof’s gone bad, so his lordship didn’t want anyone getting in. You’ll have to go round the way you came.”

So round they went, through the rose garden, drab and thorny in the snow, and were surprised to come across Lord Auldmon, all on his own, with his hands in the pockets of his greatcoat, coming toward them. “Ah, there you are,” he said. “The Lamb said you’d be in the stable block, where you can’t hear the gong, so I thought I’d better come along and fetch you. Sunshine, do me a favor and run ahead, will you? Tell Mrs Device to go ahead and light the fire in the study. Uncle Matt and I have some business with one of the guests that we’d like to get through before dinner, and we’ll want it nice and warm.”

Aziraphale looked astonished, as well he might, for a footman could almost always be spared to call people in, and Mrs Device could easily have been told to light the fire before he’d come all this way. But you couldn’t backtalk Lord Auldmon even if he was your father, could you? So he only said: “Yes, sir. Come along, Crowley.”

“No, Mr Crowley, stay and keep me company as we walk back,” said Lord Auldmon, and there was nothing either of them could do, except as they were told.

It’s all right, Crowley told himself, giving Aziraphale not so much a nod and a smile as a couple of twitches in the relevant parts of his face.  Keep your mouth shut and get through it. He let Lord Auldmon take his arm in an authoritative matter, and focused on not bumping into him as they followed Angel’s dead run for the front door. 

“You and Sunshine are very great friends,” said Lord Auldmon.

“Yes, sir,” said Crowley. “Don’t worry, I’m not about to let it go to my head. I have plenty people reminding me of my place.” Oh, well, the “keeping your mouth shut” plan always failed. Might as well fail sooner as later.

“Ah,” said Lord Auldmon. “But do you know what your place is? Really?”

“Of course I do! I’m a charity boy and a lefthanded lowborn ginger Sscots orphan with eyess and legs that dinnae work right! Oh, and here’ss the lissp coming back! And now I’m giving ye backchat in return for a cricket bat and hosspitality becausse that’ss jusst how low and ungrateful I am!” He managed to stop himself at last, biting down on his tongue; but Lord Auldmon was laughing, a real laugh that crinkled his eyes and softened his mouth and made him, just for a moment, look more like Aziraphale’s father than like Bolt’s.

“And you are my little boy’s boon companion,” he said, “my little Sunshine, who talks too much, reads too much, thinks too much, and worries too much; who had to have his hands tied down to keep him from waving them about when he talks; the cleverest of all his brothers and the least able to concentrate on what he needs to learn; who is too soft for this world we live in. Who has gone all Fall term with an exemplary conduct record, although I know we sent him off still unable to keep his environs tidy or stop himself from daydreaming when he’s supposed to be alert for a ball. While you, Bolt tells me, get detention or six of the best twice a month.”

“Well? And what aboot it? Ye canna gae caning an angel, but a charity boy needs a lick or two once in awhile jusst for exissting.” You tied his hands down? Crowley had spent a good part of his young life with his left hand tied down to force him to use his right, which had not made learning to write any easier on him; but that such a thing could be done to Angel, whose right hand was so firm and capable, seemed unspeakably horrible, and it was all he could do not to speak it; only the thought of how upset Aziraphale would be, if he lost his temper enough to be sent away, kept his indignation under his tongue. Aziraphale was inside now, and they had somehow paused in the lee of the wall marking the turn to the stable block. The drive and the excessively vast front lawn were still except for the whirl of the snowflakes, the new white crust between them and the front entrance broken only by the dark marks of Angel’s running feet.

“I’m doing this very badly,” said Lord Auldmon. “I know you’ve had it drilled into you that being a charity boy is a bad thing and the world is doing you a favor by letting you breathe. But you’re not just a charity boy, are you? You’re a Prince Foundation boy, which means you impressed somebody enough to give you a chance and when you got the chance you grabbed onto it. Nobody knows the process by which the Foundation picks the boys it tests, but I know that when they leave, those boys - they do well. They go into professions and make their names. Some of them go into society; some of them wind up with titles, either for favors to the Crown or by marriage. Most of all, they make money, and as a man with an estate to keep up let me tell you that is no small thing.”

Crowley blinked at him. “As a boy who’s lived with nae money, let me tell you, I know it’s not.”

Lord Auldmon laughed his unpracticed, halting laugh. “I had a friend who was a charity boy once. Not a Prince Boy - the Foundation didn’t exist yet. Still, a very bright boy, very bold, and a very great friend. I used to have him here on holidays, too, and if there was no amusement prepared for us, I could count on Luke to have some brilliant idea that would keep us busy and happy the whole time. If he lacked anything, I was happy to supply it. Because there is nothing in this world more pleasant, than to freely give to those we love. But there is nothing in this world harder, than to accept freely what is freely given, if it is given from abundance and received by poverty.”

Crowley closed his hand on the memory of marks that had crossed his palms that term, some of which would have bled on Aziraphale’s palms had Crowley not been fast enough with a glib and cheeky lie, and said nothing. (“They will use you as a matter of course,” Old Mr Prince reminded him. “You must use them by choice. Don’t feel guilty about it. They don’t!” But Angel did feel guilty for accepting his intervention, which he would never dream of asking for. Old Mr Prince did not know Angel.)

“Everyone was very anxious that we both remember our places, and yet no one ever discussed what our places were. We both had the vague idea - I believe most people have this idea - that we are all in some giant hierarchical system, some Great Chain of Being with rocks or sea stars or something of that sort at the bottom, and God at the top, slightly above kings and queens. And in that Great Chain of Being, it was taken for granted that Luke was relatively low and I was relatively high. That anything that went down that chain, from me, to him, was largesse, but that anything that he did manage to give me, any friendship or advice or help, as Heaven knows I needed help, with Latin grammar, was only my due. Was what he owed me. That if he ever said no to me, he was failing in some higher duty toward me, as his superior in the Great Chain. Which was, not to put too fine a point on it, a load of rubbish.”

The cold was beginning to chap Crowley’s lips. He licked them. “What happened to him, sir?”

Lord Auldmon looked past Crowley and hunched his shoulders, very slightly. “I demanded something of him, assuming it would be granted. He refused me. I was righteously indignant and offended. He unleashed a tirade of bitterness I had no idea he’d been accumulating and made a counter demand of me. I rejected it out of hand, on principle. He stormed out of my life and I haven’t seen him since. For some years, I hated him.”

Crowley shifted uncomfortably. His Prince-bestowed coat was warm, but he was lost in this sea of words. “Aziraphale will never hate anybody,” he said. “And I’ll never hate him.”

“I certainly hope not,” said Lord Auldmon. “That’s why I’m telling you this, you see. I’ve tried to raise my boys understanding their places in the world, their real places. Because there is no Great Chain of Being. People like you Prince Boys, like all those ‘upstart Americans’ that are moving in on our titles with their wealthy beautiful daughters, prove that. But that doesn’t mean the world’s a ladder you can move freely up and down, or that there’s no order to maintain. We are all caught in huge webs of obligation, parts of systems in which every element must do its part or the whole network suffers. I am the head of a great family. I own an estate granted my family by Henry VIII. Everyone living on this estate owes me rents and service - but I owe them, too. I am responsible for seeing to it that their houses are liveable, that the land they rent from me is well-managed enough that they can afford the rents I charge. I am responsible to my family, to maintain this estate and provide livings for every member of it, so that they can fulfill their obligations to the Estate and to me and to the Crown, which is responsible to its citizens. I married a woman whose dowry included a manufacturing concern - I am responsible to its shareholders, many of whom are also my family, and to the people who labor in that concern. I owe them wages and tolerable working conditions and they, in return, are obliged to work up to standard. My first wife died, and I married a woman whose dowry included properties in London. The tenants of them owe me rents, I owe them maintenance. Everywhere I look, I have obligations, my family has obligations, everything I do, every move I make, is governed by these vast interlocking webs of obligations, and my children are in the same nets. Even Sunshine, even the Lamb. But you - you are not my responsibility, you owe me nothing and I owe you nothing.”

“You - gave me a cricket bat.”

“Because I could, because I wanted to give my son’s friend something and it was Christmas and if, as I realize is possible, you don’t want a cricket bat, you don’t have to keep it. Sunshine will have to keep the foil, I know he doesn’t want it, but he will start fencing next term, and he will keep it out of his duty to me, but your duty - your network of duty - is entirely separate from our affairs. Your network includes any family you may still have, and the Prince Foundation, and King and Country, and whatever network of education and employment those lead you to, but you are entitled to trade that cricket bat to another boy for something better, or break it in two and leave it by the side of the road, or give it away to someone poorer than you who wants it more. It’s not my business what you do with it. And if Sunshine gives you something - you don’t have to take it. It’s his choice to give or not, and your choice to receive or not. Because that’s what friends are. People it’s possible to say no to.”

Crowley shivered. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

Lord Auldmon sighed. “No, of course you don’t. I’m sorry, I got carried away on my theme, and you’re cold and goodness, that’s rather a lot of grease, isn’t it? You’d better change your clothes, and scrub up in a sink - a washbasin won’t do.” He started moving again, more quickly now, and Crowley took his longest slithering strides to keep up. “Fortunately our laundress is a dab hand at grease. She’s married to Mr Lesley, you see, and has intimate experience with it. Don’t let anything I said worry you. There’s not a reason in the world you and my boys can’t enjoy the rest of the holiday however you like. Only, I don’t want you ever to look at Sunshine the way Luke looked at me, and if you aren’t boon companions forever, which I must warn you is seldom the case with early friendships, it needs to be for some other reason than the load of bitterness Luke built up against me.”

“Angel won’t ever treat me the way you treated him,” Crowley declared stoutly.

“No, I daresay he won’t. Ah, we’ve stayed out too long - there he is coming to look for us.” Lord Auldmon broke into a jog to meet Aziraphale on the steps of their stately home, leaving Crowley panting bewildered in his wake.

Well, grownups were strange. But Angel was Angel, and after holding the door for his father he jumped off the steps and came to meet Crowley on the drive. “There’s ice on the steps,” he said. “I almost fell going up them, so take care. If you go up by the wall, the ice is thinner and you can brace yourself.”

“I know how to climb stairs.” Crowley twitched his mouth so Angel’d know he wasn’t really cross about it. “Your old man wants me to find a sink to get the grease off.”

“We’ll use the one in the first floor back bath. We should just have time before the gong rings. Come along.”

Chapter Text

At last there were no more sinners to comfort as they died and no more innocent children to send up the Rainbow to Heaven. Aziraphale folded his wings and drifted on the waters, weeping for all those he had not reached in time to ease their passing. For it was no moment to him whether they passed to Heaven or to Hell or to Purgatory; their suffering as they departed the Earth he could not bear. Here the Serpent, grown huge, found him as he sank beneath the weight of the world’s sorrow, and bore him up, so that he did not founder in the waves.

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

What with one thing and another, it was nearly teatime and the afternoon was drawing in before Frank drove Inspector Lamb to the bookshop, still locked and dark. Gabriel and Sandalphon Fell both met them there, emerging from a taxi as Frank parked in front of the bakeshop. The streets were getting livelier as they got darker, the restaurants open for business, the lights on in the print shop, the bakeshop making the whole place fragrant with teacake, and people passed to and fro about their own affairs. Sandy held up a bunch of keys with an expression of smugness rather shocking on his immobile face. “They were in the drawer of the occasional table in her front hall,” he said. “I knew she had them.”

“As it happens, keys were found in your brother’s effects, so we probably don’t need them after all,” said Inspector Lamb, mounting the steps to the door. “Let’s see if one of them fits, here. Before we go in, I want to make clear what we’re doing. This is not a general search of the premises. Since the business, as opposed to the building, belongs to Aziraphale Fell, we’d need a warrant or his permission for that and as of right now there’s no reason to think the murderer was ever here more than any other place. What we want is anything to indicate that a struggle, or the murder itself, might have taken place here - which would change the whole complexion of affairs - or some evidence to help us fill in the very large blanks in the deceased’s final day, who he might have met and where he might have gone. We will happily take the family’s advice on where to look for that evidence, and it may involve a certain amount of flipping through papers, but we’ll strive not to leave a mess or to poke about in personal things not germane to the issue. Ah, here we go; nice well-oiled lock, too.” He stepped in and looked around, taking stock. “Lighter than I expected.” He looked up at a stained glass oculus two floors above, making the most of the feeble evening illumination and the yellow glows in the windows of some of the flats overlooking it. “Very nice, that skylight there. Still, we’d better have more. Where’s the switch?”

“No idea,” said Gabriel, crowding in after him and looking about with an air of alertness, rather like a young dog who wants to flush game, but doesn’t know how. “I’ve never been here before when Sunshine wasn’t around. Should we open the blinds?”

“The world passing in the street doesn’t need to know what’s going on. I believe there’s only the one switch, by the entrance to the back room,” said Sandalphon, picking his way between tables and shelves toward a round arch. There was not much wall for him to grope along, as shelves full of books took up most of the space on it. Shaded bulbs hanging at intervals beneath the mezzanine suddenly illuminated the tops of the bookshelves, while making the shadows at their feet much darker. “And there’s table lamps about, oil and electric - Sunshine’s usual muddle.”

Dust, and books, and tables, and statuary, from a slender Marianne in Phyrgian cap with books stacked around her feet to a bronze cupid precariously perched on one foot atop a tiered round bookcase like a cakestand. A very large brass cash register atop a very small sales desk. Four pillars supporting the mezzanine, which was labeled with the points of the compass, making the stained glass of the oculus suddenly snap together as a compass rose.  The area immediately beneath the oculus was relatively open, with a round gold rug and matching low armchairs upholstered in worn gold velvet. “Well, I can guarantee there was no struggle in this room,” said Inspector Lamb. “You couldn’t knock anybody over the head without also knocking over a stack of Bibles or whatnot. Anything strike either of you as out of the ordinary about it?”

Both Fells shook their heads. “But we wouldn’t, necessarily,” said Sandalphon. 

“Sunshine never could keep his things in order,” said Gabriel, with the indulgent grimace which Frank had begun to recognize as being applicable specifically to his youngest surviving brother. “He’s always perfectly clean, himself, but he’d never have passed an inspection at school for the state his things would get into, if Crawly hadn’t tidied up after him. And he’s forever getting more books and moving things around.”

“If Joshua was stopping here he’s bound to have left some trace,” said Inspector Lamb. “Is the flat above? Right. I can poke about down here. Abbot, you go up and see what you can find, and you two Fells can be on hand to answer questions.”

Frank would have considered it generous on the Inspector’s part to leave the more promising field of search to his junior, had the stairs looked more likely to carry the older man’s not insignificant weight. Sandalphon cast a jaundiced eye over them, himself, and moved into the back room, leaving Gabriel to lead the way upstairs, the structure shaking under his brisk and heavy shoes. Frank proceeded more cautiously, joining Gabriel at a shelf crammed with volumes in leather, boards, and dustjackets, in no apparent order: he noticed a particularly fine edition of Paradise Lost squeezed between The Centuries of Nostradamus and Only a Factory Girl by Rosie M. Banks. “I think this is the one,” said Gabriel, bending over to peer at the shelves. “Right, here’s the knob.” He reached into the triangle formed by Bewick’s British Birds leaning against The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and twisted. The bookcase shifted and became a door, swinging inward. He chuckled. “Sunshine got such a kick out of this door! Good thing he never locks it. I’d be afraid of customers getting in and robbing him blind, if he ever got customers.”

The flat behind the books was one medium-sized chamber (“The place is over 150 years old, so the bathroom and kitchen are in the basement; don’t know how he stands it, but it’s not as if he cooks,”) with windows facing the gay curtains of Mrs Potts’s establishment (already discreetly drawn and lights shining through them),  the street, and the courtyard behind the theater. Except for a more-or-less tidy white iron bedstead covered with a worn duvet, an old-fashioned washstand, and a large armoire in yellow walnut, the furnishings were much like those of the shop, consisting primarily of books and things to put books on. Small, gleaming new radiators crouched under the windows, and the firebox of the small open hearth, decorated with gaily painted tiles, had become a niche for yet another bookcase; but the light up here was still by gas jet and oil lamp, which Gabriel lit with a flick lighter from his pocket, remarking: “I keep telling him this whole place is going up in flames someday.”

“Yet it looks as though the tenant buildings have electric light on all floors,” said Frank, opening the armoire and being confronted by tidy, uniform ranks of coats, trousers, and waistcoats ranging from cream to brown, with a single funereal black in the very back, and white shirts. Everything was much too large for the slender corpse to have worn in life.

“Do they? I think he was already upgrading them when the Crash came. Just like him to put it off for his own place and wind up not doing it at all. Good excuse to raise the rents, though, so I’m just as glad he did things in that order.” He reached over Frank’s shoulder to pull out a drawer, which proved to be full of tartan bow ties. “Wow, there is no room in here for any of Joshua’s stuff, is there? He must have been living out of his suitcase. Which wasn’t with him at the Abbey, only an overnight grip.”

They looked about for a suitcase and found none; nor any other sign of occupancy by anyone but a bookish middle-aged man with a sweet tooth (a box of chocolates between a copy of The Napoleon of Notting Hill and a jar of Vaseline on the nightstand; peppermint bullseyes, remarkably similar in color to Inspector Lamb’s eyes, in a dish amid lotions, colognes, and a blackletter edition of Faust on the dressing table; a tin of toffee on top of The Book of the Damned on the mantelpiece). The washbasin and pitcher were dry, the tooth-cup empty, the dressing table lacking all those things which a man would take with him on an overnight visit. 

While Gabriel busied himself opening and shutting drawers and wondering, with increasing bewilderment and impatience, what had become of Joshua’s things, Frank found himself attracted to a large photograph which held pride of place on the mantelpiece, where the light at this hour did not allow him to make it out in detail. He picked it up and carried it to the window above the street, where the streetlamps had come up and streamed yellow through the dusty lace curtain.

The picture had been taken in a studio, none too many years ago, and was of three men as unlike as any three men Frank had ever seen together. The one with the little beard and dark curly hair could only be Joshua Fell, and he examined the face with great interest, as despite the stultifying effect of studio portraiture, it was more lifelike and distinctive than the generic tourist pose of the Eiffel Tower picture, and moreover reproduced far more details. The impish triangular face, with irregular features and large dark eyes, was primarily attractive due to the good humor of its expression. He leaned jauntily against the arm of a chair with a high round back, where sat someone Frank presumed to be the elusive Aziraphale, as he wore a suit composed of clothing he had just seen in the armoire. His hair was also curly, but un-Fellishly fair; so fair as to appear white in the photograph, and surmounted a round face and stocky figure, like his older brother and cousin. Yet not as like them as all that; everything about him appeared rounded, soft even, and the face frozen in time on a photograph looked somehow more mobile than the living faces of any of the other members of his family.

The third figure drew the eye both by its contrast and its position. Whereas the Fell brothers wore summer suits in light colors, the man rising behind the round back of the chair was all in some shade that appeared black in the photo, his dark hair lying flat to his head, his face dominated and largely concealed by a pair of dark glasses. Where the Fells smiled with their entire bodies, the long thin mouth of this figure quirked up ever so slightly at one corner, like a man who sees the joke but refuses to laugh at it. One long-fingered hand rested, not on the back of the chair, where the photographer had almost certainly told him to place it, but on Aziraphale’s shoulder; the other, on Joshua’s. This, presumably, was Crowley. Or, as Gabriel would no doubt identify him, Crawly, looming over Sunshine and the Lamb, and Frank could not decide whether the effect was threatening, as a hawk stooping on prey, or protective, as one spreading wings over a nest.

Frank was about to turn and replace the picture on the mantelpiece when movement in the street below caught his eye: a long black car driving much too quickly, and coming to much too abrupt a stop in the nimbus of the streetlamp. No doubt many cars would stop along this street as Soho’s nightlife got underway; but from this one emerged, on the driver’s side, a lanky black figure, who walked with a peculiar gait, long legs moving more like a mannequin displaying a frock than like someone trying to get anywhere; yet he rounded the car in three erratic strides. A black arm swung out like a pendulum, a long-fingered hand gripped the door handle, and the door popped open, to release a pale rounded figure, holding a bakers’ box, who emerged from the car like a bird emerging from a birdhouse. When the head tilted so that the light from the streetlamp fell upon it, Frank Abbot was treated to the sight of Aziraphale Fell spying Joshua’s motorbike propped up beside the steps, and smiling all over his face with a delight that fully justified the persistence of the childhood nickname of Sunshine.

Perhaps, when Frank became a more hardened detective, he would no longer have moments like this, when his heart plunged in sympathetic pain, anticipating the extinction of delight.

“I believe your brother just got home,” he said to Gabriel. “Let’s go down.”

The bell above the door tinkled. Frank paused at the top of the spiral and observed the whole process from above. 

First, Aziraphale trotted in, cradling his baker’s box, his face wreathed in smiles and his whole body relaxed and open, calling as he entered: “Joshua! Maggie! Have you got the kettle on?” Behind him, Crowley, all loose dark limbs, put a suitcase down and pulled the door shut. 

The force of Gabriel’s pounding feet shook the staircase. Crowley looked up, his expression entirely concealed by his hat and the dark glasses he wore, and froze for a long moment, while Aziraphale paused in the middle of removing his own hat, radiant smile dimming and contracting, his body bracing itself. “Bolt? Goodness, I wasn’t expecting you! I hope we brought enough croissants. They’re from that little patisserie I told you about, exactly like the ones you get in France, and -” 

“We won’t want croissants, Sunshine,” said Gabriel, in the tone of a nursemaid to a child who insists on focusing on a toy when it’s time to take its medicine. 

Inspector Lamb and Sandalphon emerged through the archway from the back room, and Aziraphale’s smile dimmed even more, his shoulders drawing slightly upward. “And Sandy! What a, goodness, this is a surprise? Who are these gentlemen? And where’s Josh?” Crowley, no longer frozen, strode forward to stand beside him, on his left side, head turning slowly as if scanning every face in the room with his ominously hidden eyes. Inspector Lamb cleared his throat and opened his mouth.

“The Lamb’s gone,” said Gabriel. “Somebody murdered him.”

The face went rounder for a moment; eyes, mouth, cheeks; and then the blow landed, collapsing Aziraphale in upon himself, his body realizing even as his mind rejected. Crowley put a hand under his elbow. “What?”

If Inspector Lamb’s glare had been a kick, Gabriel Fell would have fallen the last three steps, but he appeared not to notice it. “These men are policemen. We had to let them in to look for clues.”

“The Lamb? But - who would - No -“ The hat and baker’s box dropped; Crowley caught the box and let the hat tumble unheeded. Somehow the two men proceeded forward, across the floor, toward the nearest gold-upholstered chair. Aziraphale’s crumpling face turned toward Inspector Lamb and the solid lump of Sandalphon behind him. “Is this true?”

“I’m afraid so, sir. You’d better sit down - you’ve had a shock -“

Crowley had already steered him onto the low round seat of the gold chair, but he didn’t seem to notice. His face was wet, tears streaming over the pale cheeks, following the laugh lines into the corners of his mouth. “Crowley. Crowley, they say the Lamb is dead.”

“I heard, Angel,” said Crowley, in an unexpectedly soft voice. “S’all right, I’ve got you -“

“It is not all right! The Lamb’s dead!” His voice went shrill and the tears were audible in it now. 

Gabriel crossed the carpet, holding out a meaty hand and making hushing noises as if he were soothing a fractious horse. “Pull yourself together, Sunshine. We’re all upset.”

Crowley, not moving his hand from Aziraphale’s arm, stepped between him and his brother and suddenly his voice was not soft at all, but a flat hard angry sneer. “What are you and the family thug doing here, dumping out bad news like a load of rocks on his head? Give him a blasted moment!” 

Gabriel drew himself up, affronted, and it occurred to Frank, watching from the vantage of the mezzanine, seeing Sandalphon grit his teeth and shake his head and take a tentative step forward, that if either of these men had been the ones murdered, there would be no need to look farther than the other for the perpetrator of the crime. “I have more right here than you do. You’ve dropped him off. You can leave now.”

Aziraphale made a harsh gasping noise, returning everyone’s focus to him. “Mag,” he choked, “Where - she - Magdala!”

Everyone looked blank except for Crowley, whose thin mobile mouth needed no help from the hidden portions of his face to convey horror. “Oh God and Satan both! Magdala! Where is she? Is she all right?” 

Frank could not, from this angle, see Gabriel’s face. Sandalphon’s did something he didn’t recognize before it returned to heavy solicitor blankness. “Who is Magdala, sir?” Inspector Lamb asked, in his gentlest official tone, normally used with children or distraught women. Evidently he knew a powder keg when he stood next to one.

“Joshua Fell’s wife,” said Crowley, voice heavy with contempt. “Is she all right? Was she assaulted too? Is she in hospital?”

“Joshua doesn’t have a wife,” said Gabriel, in tones of contemptuous incredulity. “He’s been very determinedly not having a wife for almost as long as Sunshine has.”

“What’s that got to do with anything? He’s got one now. It doesn’t matter how much you disapprove of it, it’s a legal marriage.”

“He was at the Abbey yesterday and he never said he was married!”

“He must have! That’s what he went all the way up there to say!”

“Where is she then? There’s no sign of her in the bedroom.”

“Why would there be? They’re not staying here.” The hand holding the baker’s box waved erratically to indicate the bookshop in the entirety of its dust and clutter; the other remained firm and steady on Aziraphale’s shoulder. “Nobody with a choice about it would bring their bride here to stay! She got a part in the Star’s next play. The  manager let the playwright put a camp bed in his office so Josh and Mags could have her flat till the tenant that’s given notice gets out! And the question is, is she there or in hospital or where is she?”

“Oh, my god,” said Sandalphon, his face resolving into a definite expression at last, one of dismay and annoyance. “He wasn’t talking theoretically. He’s been and gone and done it. Oh, my god. No wonder - oh, my god. An actress. He married a Boche actress!”

“Being an actress isn’t a reason to get out of Europe in a hurry,” said Gabriel. “What else is she? A Yid, or a Red, or a gypsy, or what?”

Inspector Lamb watched this spectacle with thoughtful eyes. Frank felt embarrassment nearly indistinguishable from horror and strove to hold a face of professional detachment. Crowley made a sound, all consonants and fury. Aziraphale stood up.

“Get out of my house, Gabriel,” he said, tears still pouring down his cheeks but his voice steady. “You too, Sandy. I will call you tomorrow and we will talk sensibly and you will not speak of your sister-in-law in those terms ever again.”

“Now, Sunshine -“

“Out.”

“You can’t throw me out of my own building!”

“It’s Pater’s building and my inheritance and you are not welcome while you talk like that! This is not one of your factories! You don’t make the rules!”

Sandalphon looked at Inspector Lamb, who nodded, then strode up and took Gabriel’s arm. “Good evening, Aziraphale,” he said.

“But -“ Gabriel looked down at Sandalphon in astonishment.

“No buts,” said Sandalphon. “Our duty’s done.”

Aziraphale sniffed, drew a handkerchief out of the pocket of his coat, wiped his face, and said, in a voice still trembling with rage or grief or both: “Give my love to Ruth and the children.”

The two elder Fells departed. Frank came down the stairs, trying not to make a sound, not quite succeeding. He took up position beside the Inspector, who watched Aziraphale wiping his face, and wiping it again. “All right,” said Crowley, his voice now neither furious nor gentle, but businesslike. “First things first. No offense, but I want to see your badges. Always best to have things straight.”

“On which principle I will also ask who you are, sir,” said Inspector Lamb, producing his credentials while closing the distance between them. Frank followed suit.

“Anthony J Crowley, solicitor with Prince and Prince, representing Mr Aziraphale Fell, the late Mr Joshua Fell, and Mrs Magdala Fell, assuming she’s a widow now and not another corpse whom the police somehow overlooked.”

“That’s enough, dear boy.” Aziraphale emerged from behind the handkerchief as Crowley scrutinized the badges, which must have been difficult through those dark lenses. “I’m sure they’re as anxious as we are to see Magdala. If she - if the - the sooner we head next door the better for everyone.”

“That’s very true, sir,” said Inspector Lamb. “But, seeing as we’re all here now, I would like to clear up one small detail before we go.”

Aziraphale blew his nose. “What detail?” Crowley snapped.

“I understand you possess a service revolver, Mr Fell. Do you mind telling me where it is?”

Aziraphale blinked - his eyes in their nest of laugh lines were hazel, large, and still brimming with tears - and said, voice striving and failing not to quaver: “Where it always is? In a locked box in the bottom drawer of my desk in the back room? Where it can’t hurt anyone but I can tell Gabriel I’ve got it for ‘protection,’ as if a gun ever protected anybody.”

Inspector Lamb shook his head. “That was where Mr Sandalphon Fell thought you kept it. But it’s not there.”

“The box is gone?”

“The box is there, open and empty.”

“But - that’s -“

“As lockboxes go it wasn’t up to much,” said Crowley. “Anybody with a similar box could have opened it with their own key. I take it there’s evidence consistent with a Webley .455 Mark 6 in the case?”

How careful he is, not to say it, Frank thought. Not to say any of it. Murdered, shot, wounds, all the ugliness kept out of his mouth and Aziraphale’s ears.

Aziraphale slipped out from under Crowley’s hand, his face grim. (He had been through more expressions since he walked through the door than his entire family had displayed all day.) He strode (an odd effect, with his rounded body, and he moved as if to an inaudible cadence, like a man who has made long marches in lines with other men, but with a small hitch in his step, not quite enough to qualify as a limp) into the back room, and they all followed him past the book- and paper-covered desk to a table with a medal-draped bust of Plato on top. He pulled open a drawer, dug past a clutter of what looked like mostly smoking and writing paraphernalia, dragged out a box from the very back, turned, and held it out. The lid was flat and dusty. “Whoever took it, they didn’t take the ammunition. It’s not - it wasn’t -  loaded.”

“Is that the only box of ammunition you own?”

“It is.”

“Not a hard weapon to find ammunition for, though,” said Crowley, still businesslike. “Tell ‘em how to know yours if it turns up, Angel.”

He wiped his face again. “Well - apart from the serial number, which I don’t remember a bit, when I cleaned it before I put it away I scratched pax on the cylinder with the point of a nail file.” He replaced the ammunition in the drawer, pushed it shut, and marched over to the rolltop writing desk, where he drew a bunch of keys out of a pigeonhole. “Now, if there’s no more urgent trivia let us please go see about Magdala? Bring the croissants, dear boy. We’ll want them.”

Out they went, locking the door but leaving the lights on behind them. Wintry dusk was well advanced now, and the restaurants were doing a fair business for teatime. Aziraphale led them into the courtyard to a door in the rear of the bakeshop, which opened without a key, then up steep stairs, smelling of floor polish and yeast, to the second floor, where he knocked at the third door on the right. “Magdala, my dear?”

The door practically flew open, to reveal a woman with a great deal of brown hair and large round glasses. “Oh, thank goodness! Come in!”

Aziraphale’s face started to crumple again. “Where’s Magdala?”

“I’m here,” said a voice behind the young woman, who stepped aside to reveal Mrs Potts presiding over a laden tea table, Sergeant Shadwell clutching a mug with both hands, a gangly young man having difficulty with an afternoon paper, and a swarthy young woman with strong features and large, desperately unhappy eyes. The woman stood up slowly from a cheap modern couch. “Are those men with you policemen?”

“Inspector Lamb and Sergeant Abbot, looking into the death of Mr Joshua Fell,” said the Inspector, presenting his credentials yet again, as Aziraphale surged across the room to hug the young woman. “Am I addressing Mrs Joshua Fell?”

“You are,” she answered, over her brother-in-law’s shoulder. Her English accent was very good; only a certain Germanic cadence betrayed her European origins. “It’s about time you got here.”

Chapter Text

Aziraphale saw the bees going back and forth, and the Serpent watching them, and said to the Serpent: “Why are you watching bees? Aren’t you supposed to be tempting humanity to sin?” To which the Serpent responded: “Everyone needs a rest now and then. Where do you suppose these bees are carrying all that pollen?” So together they followed the bees, until they found a hollow tree, and honey oozing from the crack. The smell was so enticing, Aziraphale took some upon his finger and tasted it, finding it sweeter and more delectable than the fruits of Eden, of which he had once eaten plentifully, and he was overcome with the desire for more.

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

Lord Auldmon and the Prince Foundation both paid for Extras (Music, Dancing, Fencing for Aziraphale, French, and eventually Greek) in the curriculum. Grimsby’s scholarship did not.

This was the chief thing that kept them from becoming a closed set, the Three Musketeers with no room for a Dartagnan. Grimsby, with more free time, acquired, despite his swottish habits, more friends who were not Angel and Crowley than either of them acquired friends who were not each other and Grimsby.  (Friends to everyone else, connections to the Prince Foundation. The words used didn’t matter to Crowley. Angel and Grimsby were his, that was all.)

This was probably just as well. With both Angel and Crowley looking out for Grimsby, he was less of a target than he was on his own, and once freed of his natural fear of bigger boys (i.e., all of them) he proved to have a talent for organizing people without making them feel bossed around. This made Crowley’s obligate leadership of the charity boys much less onerous than it would have been without a reliable assistant. Grimsby was the one who identified the particular academic strengths and weaknesses of each charity boy and got them to help each other in a kind of round robin way even where they didn’t line up into straightforward swaps, so that no one would lose their scholarships; a scheme into which several of the more mediocre posh boys managed to buy themselves a place with more material contributions.

Crowley, thus freed of less congenial tasks, devoted his energies to meeting Prince Foundation expectations, finding the easiest roads to the greatest benefits, circumventing unreasonable rules, and solving problems. He was the one who  removed Rhino as a threat forever by suggesting that he take up boxing; which protected his hands by putting them in gloves and gave him plenty of unobjectionable opponents whom he could brag about, if bested, or be condoled for, if bested by.  He was the one who recognized that numbers did to Angel what printed text did to him; and though the same solutions would not work for him (given that any given configuration of digits was as valid as any other, by itself), the sheer relief of having someone believe that his difficulty was real reduced a lot of the stress of maths for Angel, while understanding the root of the problem enabled Crowley to devise many small tricks to help him out, and Grimsby to monitor his notebooks and nip a number of errors in the bud. Crowley also learned the rhythms of the school and the habits, hobbyhorses, and weaknesses of masters and staff, the better to utilize flattery, shortcuts, loopholes, and distractions to evade and reduce discipline, for himself and anyone he chose to favor with his assistance.

With Grimsby and Crowley to pave the way for him, Angel became far more influential than his natural proclivities would have allowed on their own. In addition to being, when occasion warranted, an excellent packhorse and an impenetrable shield, he was the one who did the research and made the petitions to the correct grownups to obtain spectacles for Grimsby at no cost to his family, set the example of sharing boxes from home and older-brother-mediated bakery splurges with all the boys instead of only his own particular cronies, passed on some of the benefits of Extras by getting boys who didn’t take the classes to help him practice Fencing and Dancing, read out lessons for anyone (i.e. Crowley) who learned better from listening than from reading, and lessened the tedium of wet days by sharing out or reading aloud from the books he’d brought from home, which were far more novel and less tediously improving than the ones supplied by the school. 

Even the Exercise Book of the Angel Aziraphale, which the boys originally dismissed as being a mere variation on Bible reading, turned out to be a bit of all right, because Angel’s namesake was, when you came right down to it, rather a naughty angel. Several boys gasped out loud in horror when, after giving his flaming sword to Adam, the Angel Aziraphale lied to God’s face about it, and braced themselves for his punishment - which never came, for “the Almighty never mentioned it again.” He ate an entire hive’s worth of honey before, feeling bad about leaving the bees homeless, building the first skep and giving honey to the first cook; discovered wine and drunkeness; spread his wings over Zoar, the third City of the Plain, so that the angels smiting Sodom and Gommorrah overlooked it; exhausted himself trying to ease the passing of all the sinners who died in the Flood and used the rainbow as a path to send all the drowned children up to Heaven; lost a wrestling match to Jacob because he’d worn himself out feasting and dancing the day before; gave humans dubious advice that somehow always worked out for them; and generally alternated subverting his orders from Heaven with reveling in the delights of Earth, without God ever calling him to task for it. The Archangel Gabriel - a prat who often made a muck of his job and left Aziraphale to clean it up, if he didn’t fob it off on him to begin with - tried to discipline him, taking away his miracle ability or setting him to the angelic equivalent of punishment tasks for the crimes of going too easy on humans and enjoying himself too much, but never seemed to recognize when he was being cheeked. The Serpent kept popping up in the stories, too, usually complaining that he’d tempted a human to do some small sin and the humans had used it as a springboard to some spectacular evil that he hadn’t even imagined, sometimes leading Aziraphale to get into a scrape, but more often assisting him to get out of one, and occasionally playing a practical joke on Archangel Gabriel. In their version of the Gospel story, the child Jesus was a bit of a handful and needed the combined efforts of Mary, Joseph, Aziraphale, and the Serpent (who insisted he was there to corrupt Him but never seemed to mind failing) to raise Him up to be a proper Messiah. On top of all this, Joshua’s huge staggering letters were much easier to read than print, so that this readily became Crowley’s favorite book, queer 17th-century grammar and all.

On Sunday afternoons, when other boys wrote letters home, Crowley wrote to the Prince Foundation. Not to anyone at the Foundation. The envelope was addressed to The Prince Foundation; the salutation was “Dear Sirs.” His scholarship required that he report on his own progress, and the older Prince Boys, when they deigned to notice him, assured him that he did not want to puff himself up, but should not be too modest. (“Brag without bragging,” Ligur urged him, unhelpfully.) The masters sent in their own reports each term and any discrepancies had to be at least plausible. Though he knew Miss Dagon was probably skimming all reports and passing on only the most notable bits, Crowley always imagined Old Mr Prince, seated by the fire, tilting the page to read it and puffing his cigar like a dragon. Old Mr Prince wanted the boys he sponsored to be triumphant over the other boys and the masters and the parents; for them to be, however subtly, better than the Very Best People. Crowley was determined to give him that. But everybody knew that all the letters were read by masters before going out, that letters that complained too much or vilified the masters or expressed improper sentiments, would be mysteriously Lost. The closest any Prince Boy had come to losing his scholarship - according to the word passed down from that distant and terrible time by other Prince Boys forming a chain through the years - was the one who triumphed too openly in his letters, which the Foundation didn’t receive, putting the boy in violation of the conditions of his scholarship. He had been called to speak to Old Mr Prince - then the only Mr Prince, that was how long ago this was - and the matter cleared up, but it had been a narrow squeak. Subtlety was necessary.

Crowley could be subtle. Crowley could juggle two sets of expectations at once. He wrote his letters in his head all through the week, polished up new words in his vocabulary, used coded terms he was reasonably sure Old Mr Prince would understand - or think he understood. Telling grownups the truth was a tricky business, only to be done sparingly. 

The trickiest thing to talk about was his punishments, because the masters would surely report that he got quite a few, and Old Mr Prince needed to think neither that he deserved them, nor realize that he literally had more than his share - because he took Angel’s. Sometimes Grimsby’s, too, and sometimes one of the other charity boys whose circumstances at the time justified intervention, but mostly Angel’s.

Angel was often cross with him about this, but the prospect of revealing his peculiar indisposition to the masters was also one that instilled great anxiety in him. He’d been terrified, before his first day of Fencing class, that it would be exposed, and tremendously relieved to learn that buttoned fencing foils on protective gear did not land solidly enough to trigger a reaction. Caning, however, he knew for a fact would do so, and his solution to this, supposedly, was never to commit a caning offense. This should have been simple enough, for Rhino had been accurate in calling him a goody-two-shoes. He did not like to break rules, and such mischief as was in him was too benign and good-natured to run afoul of school rules. Moreover, his disarming and innocent smile was enough to melt the heart of any grownup and make his small infractions seem even smaller. No hall monitor ever caught him running, for he preferred to walk; no prefect could find fault with the state of his scrupulously clean and tidy uniform. He was less fastidious about his environment, but it only took a few low marks on their room scores after an inspection for the boys he bunked in with to start keeping an eye out for books, foil, gym shoes, notebooks, pens, and so on that he had wandered off (with his nose in a book) and left, retrieving them when spotted, and stuffing them under his pillow; from where he (or Grimsby, or Crowley, as the boys started moving freely between rooms) would retrieve and store them properly. Or as properly as they could; Angel was constitutionally incapable of folding anything into a square or arranging anything neatly. 

The trouble was that Angel was the perfect ideal of a namby-pamby schoolboy - until he wasn’t. He would not so much as stand lookout for the boys (led by Crowley) who sneaked into a forbidden part of the grounds in order to determine for themselves whether the peculiar structure, just glimpseable from the legal footpath, was in fact a  tomb haunted by the first headmaster and his three wives who had all died tragically young. (It turned out to be a folly used as a gardener’s shed). But somehow when Sedgewick Minor got his jacket caught on a fence spike and hung himself up, Angel was on hand to climb up and get him down, and then the tomfool jumped down into the forbidden zone to retrieve Sedgie’s fallen cap, in what would have been full view of the gaggle of masters who happened to come strolling along, had not Crowley thrown himself into their path. Any village toughs who dared to torment an animal or small child in the vicinity of the school risked the wrath of Angel charging out to the forbidden road to the rescue. If he couldn’t sleep (and as a rule he slept very badly) he would get up to read in the common room, so as not to disturb the other boys with the light - which meant the light in the common room window had a good chance of being noticed and bringing retribution down on all their heads. If he got hungry in the middle of the night he wouldn’t be able to sleep at all, and his sharing-out habits meant that he never had a stash of biscuits, so that the only way to feed him was to raid the kitchen. 

Worse, though he didn’t cheek the masters on purpose, his sober innocence refused to take into account any of the follies or faults that Crowley tracked so closely. He thought the rules applied to everyone and that the masters were dedicated to the virtues pushed in the handbook, so that he was likely to be honest with those he should have flattered, to chop logic with those whose words he should have pretended to accept as law, and even to correct those he should have realized had no truck with any truth but their own authority. All of which went straight past cheek to disobedience, defiance, and rebellion, requiring Crowley to act quickly to outshine him in bad behavior before the offended party could make his way past the timid politeness of Angel’s manner and realize himself offended. And Crowley’s bad behavior on these occasions had to be genuinely bad, had to be something Angel recognized as requiring punishment, or he would do his best to dig himself in deeper by protesting it. The time the games master forced Fallon to run laps as a punishment for losing his gym shoes, it took Crowley, Grimsby, Rhino, and Eden-Fisher to prevent him from saying anything on the spot, and he participated wholeheartedly in, and improvised improvements on, the revenge pranks Crowley organized on both the Games Master and the older boy who hid Fallon’s shoes, afterward. What he would do in the face of an unjust and unvolunteered-for punishment visited upon Crowley didn’t bear thinking of.

“I’d be perfectly happy to let you take detentions and conduct marks,” Crowley explained, as Angel rubbed his sore calves with the special liniment Mrs Device had sent them from Lancashire, which took the sting out of canings better than anything the infirmary stocked. “But you don’t earn those. No, you go straight for the caning offenses like a homing pigeon heading for its roost!”

“I don’t mean to!” Angel sounded heart-rendingly contrite. “And I do get detentions and conduct marks, you know.”

“You get them, but you don’t earn them,” scoffed Crowley.

“Oh, nonsense, of course I do! Grimsby -“

“Nope, Crowley’s right,” said Grimsby, lying on his stomach on his bunk and sucking a peppermint bullseye as he reviewed his Latin irregular verbs. “Fell Major told the other prefects and the monitors to be particularly hard on you because you need toughening up.”

“Nonsense! Of course he didn’t.”

“Ask Sedgie. Sedgewick Major told him so.”

“Oh! Well! They shouldn’t gossip and you shouldn’t listen to them. And anyway, if he said anything like that I’m sure it was only for my own good and the gossips exaggerate. Is that better, Crowley, or do you need some more?”

“Perfect,” said Crowley, performing a high kick to prove it. “You done your maths tasks?”

“I couldn’t concentrate. I was much too worried about you.”

“You should never do that. Always land on my feet, me, unless I want to land on my hands. Let’s go to the duck pond.”

“Oh, but I need to do my maths and you need to do your Latin!”

“We can do ‘em at the duck pond. C’mon, Grimsby!”

Grimsby was right about Fell Major; of course he was, and Crowley was sure that Angel knew it in his heart, but he could never admit it, and it would have been cruel to force him to. Fell Major would be off to America next term, anyway, and good riddance.

Everybody got through the year all right, though it was a bit touch-and-go with Fallon. Crowley had to spend most of the Long Vac at the Prince Foundation, which was all right, because he’d been allowed to go to Auldmon Abbey with Angel for the half-term and Easter holidays, and to spend the last week of Long Vac there. The Prince Boys who hadn’t received invitations anywhere resented this, possibly because Old Mr Prince ragged them about not having strong enough connections, possibly because Prince Foundation “holidays” involved a lot of drilling of everybody’s remaining weaknesses. Crowley’s had been determined to be a lack of experience in riding horses: “What will you do if you are ever invited on a fox hunt! Up you get!” The result was, that by the time he got on the train to Lancashire everything from the waist down ached, and he dreaded the climb to the Little Room next to the Nursery; but Mrs Device’s liniment soon took care of that and they had their usual jolly time - even jollier, with Sandy, Mickey, and Bolt all in Europe, Lord Auldmon in Milltown seeing to his first wife’s factories four days out of seven, and most authoritarian functions filled by Raffles-and-Ruth, whose chief concern was that nobody die or upset the scientific experiments they conducted in the schoolroom and in the cellar of the west wing, where they mummified rats and the rabbits who raided the kitchen garden. Crowley learned to swim in The Pond, they all practiced lifesaving under Raffles-and-Ruth’s stringent eyes, Aziraphale had free run of the library, Joshua and Mrs Device’s granddaughter Anathema built their own Stonehenge and required a fair amount of older sibling assistance in between bouts of secret plotting, and  Lesley allowed Crowley to drive the car around the stableyard, to the admiration of everyone who mattered.

And then they were in Second Form.

School was still horrible, but now Crowley knew the ropes, and had a reputation. His was the first crop of charity boys ever to make it through First Form without loss of a single scholarship. That this was as much, or more, Grimsby’s and Angel’s and the boys’ themselves doing as his did not matter - he was the Prince Boy for that year and the credit accrued to him, as leader of the charity boys, in the public imagination. Older Prince Boys regaled their classmates with funny stories of his haplessness on horseback,  but Archie Miller, the new First Form Boy, came to him for advice and that was - not horrible.  He, Angel, and Grimsby were the core - not of the popular clique, certainly not, that was all toffs - of a loosely-organized group that relied upon each other, to whom other boys came when they were desperate for a solution. “The entire first and second forms are in my debt, to one degree or another,” Crowley wrote to the Prince Foundation, not mentioning that these debts were not tracked or calculated in any systematic fashion, or that sometimes when he called in a favor, it was to solve somebody else’s problem. Old Mr Prince didn’t want to know that. The next time he stood before the old man sitting in front of the fire (though it was a warm day at the beginning of the Long Vac and the room felt like an oven), he stood up straight and looked him in the eye and fielded all his questions glibly.

“Some of the older boys tell me you’re Fell Minor’s toady,”he said; Angel having graduated to Minor when Doc/Raffles became Fell Major on Gabe’s leaving. (Gabriel hated being called Gabe, Crowley had learned, so now he never called him anything else.)

“Some of the older boys are in the bottom halves of their classes,” Crowley retorted. “Angel’d be at the bottom of maths if it weren’t for me, and he knows it. He’s top of every other class that matters, and look who’s in the next seat down.” As a matter of fact, it took the two of them plus Grimsby to make a single decent maths student, with occasional assists from Sedgie, but Old Mr Prince didn’t need to know that. “I know what I’m doing, and it’s not sucking up to anybody. Anyone who doesn’t think so can say it to my face, if they’ve got the guts.”

“Your masters say you’re a bit of a troublemaker. That you need a lot of discipline.”

“That’s what the Sassenach said about William Wallace.”

Old Mr Prince chuckled. “William Wallace was a troublemaker, more power to him. I can’t think of anyone worthwhile who wasn’t. Young Miller thinks you’re God’s gift to charity boys.”

“Young Miller does all right on his own. By the way, he hates being called that. Says a young miller is a baby moth.”

“Oh? What does he prefer?”

“Just Miller. Or Archie.”

“And the pre-existing Miller?”

“He’s Posh Old Miller now. Why not?”

Old Mr Prince threw back his head, his thick white hair gleaming red in the firelight, and laughed. “If you and Archie can make it stick, and Posh Old Miller can’t unstick it - yes, indeed! Why not? I suppose you want me to accept this invitation to Auldmon Abbey for you again.”

“If you can see your way clear, yes sir.”

“You brag about your connections among the toffs, yet you keep going on holiday with Fell Minor. Don’t your other - friends - want to see you in the hols, too?”

“Angel’s got the best cook. And the best marks. And the kindest heart, as far as that goes. I latched onto him for reasons and those haven’t changed. Plus he calls me his boon companion. Everybody in our year likes him, and they’d turn right against me if they thought I was disloyal.”

“I see. You’ve thought it all out, haven’t you?”

“I’ve tried to, sir.” Crowley watched his face, striving not to sweat in the close room, to seem relaxed and grown up and respectful and slightly contemptuous of the best friend anyone could have, not to feel like a rotter and a low beast for even pretending to use Angel for advantage.

“And what about John Grimsby?”

“What about him, sir?”

“He is also a boon companion of Fell Minor’s, is he not? He’s not a Prince Boy but that doesn’t mean he can’t steal a march on you.”

“Grimsby is a very useful fellow himself. I can handle him if he gets above himself.” A sudden thought occurred to him, and he took a stab in the dark. “How are Mr Ligur and his pet rugby player, sir, if I may ask?”

“Mr Ligur sets fair to have a bright future in a brokerage firm connected with the Foundation,” said Old Mr Prince. “And I believe that his friend Mr Hastur has also found a useful niche in our orbit, though rather more is asked of him than of someone who’s proven qualified to serve the Foundation’s interests more directly. What made you think of them, I wonder?”

“You can’t run a bank, and a brokerage firm, and a solicitor’s office, and whatever else there is, and a charitable foundation, adding only one boy a year.”

“A very astute observation. Especially for one of your years.”

“Poor boys grow up fast, sir. You know that.”

“Yes. Yes, I do. Very well - you may visit Auldmon Abbey during the Long Vac. Satisfy me with your horsemanship, and you can have the whole holiday.”

He did not get the whole holiday that year; but he did the year after that.

Sky viewing was not especially good at Wellborn Hall; astronomy was not an offered course, so the school had no telescope, and the roofs were the most forbidden of forbidden territory; but Crowley fell in love with the stars when Raffles-and-Ruth got everyone permission to be outside late during the Perseids and they gathered on the lawn, watching stars rain down from the August sky; so a brisk night in October found Crowley, Angel, and Grimsby arrayed on the roof of the residence hall, where a tenantless attic buffered the sleeping Sixth Form from hearing their movements on the tiles. The slant was a little steeper than Crowley had anticipated, and he had been nervous for a few moments, until Angel, his feet braced against the gutter, took hold of each of them by the hand, and then there was nothing to fear anymore, for Angel wouldn’t drop them. “It had better not cloud over,” Crowley muttered.

“Oh, there they go,” said Grimsby, in a properly awed voice. He had been skeptical of this project, but he was too good a sport not to at least try, and the first sight of a fistful of stars raining down was enough to impress anyone.

“This is what it means, in my book,” said Aziraphale, “the bit where the angels are falling and turning into demons: As on a summer night, when the heavens shower stars that fade to nothing, so did the rebellious angels fall in their thousands, and burn and blacken, till no sight of them remained in Heaven, and the Earth received them not. Ooh, there’s some more!”

“The Earth does receive them, though,” said Crowley. “Whatever doesn’t burn off lands and looks just like a rock; only if you know about rocks you can tell the difference. And sometimes they’re metal! There was a gigantic iron one in the Arctic, almost pure iron, better than you dig out of the ground, that the Esquimaux would chip bits off of to make harpoons and things, and when they showed it to Admiral Peary he built a railroad to take it back to America with him and sold it to a museum for thousands of pounds.”

“Hard lines on the Esquimaux,” said Angel. “What did they make their harpoons of after that?”

“Dunno. The book didn’t say, or at least the part I read didn’t. Maybe he gave them the thousands of pounds and they bought them? That’d be fair, since it was theirs to begin with. Whoa, that’s a grand lot!”

Grimsby waited until the final light from that batch winked out, and a new one did not begin, to say: “Hardly falling ‘in their thousands’ though. I like real fireworks better.”

“The Perseids are better’n this lot,” Crowley conceded, “but with the sky clear I had to try. It won’t hurt my feelings if you go down again before they’re done.”

“Like fun am I making that climb without Angel to catch me,” said Grimsby. “Only I wish we’d brought blankets.”

The roof was windier than they’d expected, and there is a particular bite to October air even without that, so Crowley had to concede the justice of that. “We will next time,” he said, as a new rain of fire spouted from the invisible source in the sky. “Wish I had a telescope.”

“It’d be hard to set up here,” said Angel consolingly. “Perhaps you can read Astronomy at University, and work at Greenwich, and discover new stars. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

“No money in it,” said Crowley. “Only toffs can afford to be astronomers. I’ll have to read whatever the Foundation tells me to, so I can work for one of their outfits.  They’re not educating us out of the goodness of their hearts, you know. I’ll be a barrister, or a broker, or a banker, or whatever they need me to be.”

Angel made a disapproving noise. “Charity should be freely given, with no strings attached.”

“That’s in the perfect world where your head lives, not the real one I’m stuck in.”

“My scholarship doesn’t require I do anything particular when I grow up.” Grimsby pressed up against Angel for warmth. “The toff that endowed it in his will had quarreled with all his children and said he wanted to feed and educate people who appreciated it for a change, and left all his fortune he could to raise up the poor. As long as we could pass the tests and sound pious enough.”

“Easy for you.” Crowley also pressed into Angel’s side, which gave off a nice steady heat. “You are pious.”

“Not in my heart of hearts. I’m a raging heathen, really.”

“Rubbish.”

“No, it’s true! I sit in chapel and think how much nicer it would be to sacrifice to Venus. She’s my favorite old god.”

Crowley laughed. “Aren’t you the nasty sinner, then! I feel like a heathen idolater, just walking into the church here - images and stained glass and what have you, everything High as can be. If I had to worship an old god it’d be Mercury, I reckon, but my old Gran’d come out of her grave to cane me with her own shinbone if I ever did it. What about you, Angel? You’ve read more of those old myths than the masters have. Who’d you worship, if you weren’t an angel?”

“Oh, all those old Roman gods seem like good-for-nothings to me,” said Angel primly. “Playing favorites, and throwing their weight around, and squabbling amongst themselves, not even trying to set a good example. They’re perfectly horrid, really. It’s no wonder so many of the emperors were such rotters. You’re both shivering. We should go in before you catch your deaths.”

“We can’t go in yet! They’ve barely started - ooh, here they come!” The tiles were very cold against his back, though, and neither he nor Grimsby protested when Angel let go their hands to wrap each of them up in one of his warm soft arms, and hold them as close to his warm soft sides as possible, until the eastern sky paled and they had to climb down, stiff as boards, to the window they’d sneaked out of, Angel first, to grab the others on the way down and haul them safely in. “We should do this every year,” said Crowley. 

“There’s no doing it in London. You can’t even see ordinary stars there,” Grimsby said. “When we grow up we’ll have to stop.”

“When we grow up, we’ll be able to meet in August, and go out into the country to watch the Perseids in comfort, and stay out all night, if we like,” said Angel; and they all agreed that this was by far the best plan.

At some point Grimsby shot up to normal height and started falling in love regularly. His first love was the girl at the tobacconist’s his father frequented in London, but then - like most of the boys - he became extremely interested in the girls’ school that occupied the pews across the aisle from the Wellborn Hall pews every Sunday. The two schools went to church in a weekly parade, two crocodiles of children, youths, and teachers starting out marching alone through the streets of town, till they met and proceeded side-by-side to file into the church, youngest to oldest (with master and mistress interruptions) and sit, stand, and kneel, pretending to listen.  Crowley felt his Gran’s disapproval of the High Church atmosphere frowning behind him less and less as time went on. It was all rubbish, anyway. The Exercise Book of the Angel Aziraphale made more sense than the long, dull sermons. Sometimes he dozed through them, counting on Angel and Grimsby to prod him into action when needed; but Grimsby became less reliable for that once he took up flirting across the aisle.

By this time they were in nicer quarters, only three or four to a room, with  moderate consideration given to their preferences. It had been a shock, though a pleasant one, when he, Angel, and Grimsby were assigned to share - no other toff had ever had to go in with charity boys. But perhaps no other toff had ever expressed a preference to. Angel lost a little bit of status, but he didn’t notice and Grimsby and Crowley were far too happy with the situation to work very hard to make it clear to him. Anyone who ragged him on the subject lived to regret it, Crowley’s methods of retaliation being reasonably well-honed by now.

Everyone got razors for Christmas; new kinds of soap and brushes appeared at washbasins; voices did strange things and the choir boys changed their sections or lost their places completely. The science master gave a lecture on Manhood which confused everyone. Crowley started having pleasant dreams from which he awoke in embarrassing predicaments that could only be solved by a trip to the washbasin. One night he and Angel sighed and rolled out of bed at the same time, caught each other’s eyes, and for a moment sat and stared at each other in the moonlight, before they collapsed into giggles. Crowley’s heart sped up, which was very stupid of it. “I’ll tell you who I dreamed about if you tell me who you dreamed about,” he said, because he was an idiot like that.

Angel stopped giggling abruptly, shook his head, and busied himself pouring water from the pitcher into the basin. “Oh - oh, no, I couldn’t possibly!”

Crowley thought of a number of things he could say, and said instead: “They really ought to give us more flannels.”

Eventually they were old enough to be allowed to go into town on Saturday afternoons, and spend their pocket-money as they liked. Grimsby invested his hoarded cash into becoming the boy who sold rulers, pencils, and other supplies to younger boys who came up short, and developed a sudden passion for walking in the park, because that was where the students from the girls’ school spent the most time. Angel was primarily interested in books and bakeshops and Crowley was always on the lookout for something going on: an organ grinder with a monkey, a motorist passing through, a Punch-and-Judy, a band on the bandstand, a matinee in the town’s small theater. Sometimes Grimsby left Angel and Crowley in order to go trailing after girls with other boys; sometimes Crowley left Grimsby and Angel browsing books to go have an informative conversation with an artisan; sometimes Crowley and Grimsby left Angel to select the items he would share out among the boys after tea and laid siege to a group of girls, Crowley distracting the older girl watching over their virtue while Grimsby approached the object of his current adoration. They always took luncheon and tea together, sometimes treating a couple of young ladies and feeling very grand about it.  And the years went faster.

School was still fairly horrible in other ways, with an added complication when the charity boys and some of the toffs were assigned to fag for the Sixth-Formers. In addition to the time demands of bringing them tea and keeping their rooms tidy, the fags were no longer subject to discipline by the masters, but by their fag-leaders, who had far more time, energy, and imagination to spare on the subject. Grimsby was assigned to Doc, which was a relief, and Prince Boys always had too many academic subjects to participate in fagging till they became fag-leaders themselves; but Crowley’s reputation for solving problems meant that he got drawn in at that level anyhow. And it would only get worse once Doc left. But that was a problem for Future Crowley, Angel, and Grimsby. Because if anything was a problem for one of them, it was a problem for all of them.

Right now, at this moment, in the relative privacy of the bare space under a yew tree next to the school wall (all the older boys had such private nooks, about which the masters pretended to know nothing), on a relatively dry May day, life could be worse. Grimsby was up in Doc’s chamber turning out his sock drawer (his primary job as Doc’s fag had turned out to be keeping his socks darned), so it was just Crowley, sprawled on the old rug they’d pinched so as to keep off the damp ground, with his shoes and stockings off and his feet in the air, and Angel, dipping his fingers into a jar of Mrs Device’s liniment. “I wish you wouldn’t,” Angel said, his hands broad and soft and exquisitely gentle on the welts crossing Crowley’s scrawny calves. “We don’t even know for a, for a fact that I haven’t outgrown my little infirmity. And you know, there is a possibility that I wouldn’t be sent home for it.”

“That was the headmaster who was about to catch you, and he’s already in a foul mood about something this term. So I don’t like your chances, either way. Relax! This is the first time this term I’ve had to jump in to take your walloping for you. Thought you were a reformed character.”

“I thought I was too! I’ve been so careful! But what choice did I have? I couldn’t just leave those poor boys wedged between the roofs!”

“I don’t see why not. Couple of stupid little toffs, probably needed to learn wisdom the hard way.”

“They thought they were rescuing a kitten. If anybody else had found them there, they’d have needed ladders and ropes, and the entire school looking on, to get them out, but it was hardly any trouble at all for me, once I got the right leverage, to just pull them free. Mind you, I can’t imagine how they got into those positions. They’ll be in enough trouble for the state of their uniforms. I’m sure they’ve learned their lesson without being caned.”

“Certainly being caned never taught me anything.”

“That much is obvious! What on earth possessed you to dance on the ridgepole? You could have just dropped down and crossed paths with him and found some legal way to distract him.”

“Not from where I started and where he was when I spotted him. He was bound to see me the moment I moved, so up and away from you lot was the best I could do. We should’ve got somebody from our form to stand look out for us. That poor nipper that brought us in didn’t know how to do it properly.”

“Yes. Not having Grimsby available on these occasions is very tiresome. He’ll be cross that he missed it. Better?” Angel patted his ankle.

“Yeah, thanks.” Crowley rolled over and started drawing his stockings back on while Angel wiped his hands on his handkerchief. The light through the yew tree branches was greenish and dim, turning Angel’s eyes dark. His face was still round and cherubic, but at some point his nose had stopped being funny-looking, and the long eyelashes were not girlish, but simply and beautifully his. If Crowley thought about it, he knew that his friend had spots - they all did - but if he didn’t think about it, he didn’t notice them; noticed only that Angel’s face was the best face, as his hands were the best hands, putting away the handkerchief as tidily as he could (not very); as his smell, mixed with the earth and the yew and even the unfortunate smell of stockings and liniment, was the best smell.  The yew tree had pulled his cap off as he crawled in and he had not put it back, so his curls, which were beginning to grow in again after their most recent, ruthless cropping, stood up around his head and tried to creep onto his forehead. Beyond the wall, a dray rumbled by; beyond the yew, the first cricket match of the season was underway; but these were distant sounds of an unreal, unimportant world.

“I know you say it’s not so bad,” said Angel, leaning his back against the wall and stretching his legs out flat, “but I can’t help thinking that, if that were true, you wouldn’t be so quick to spare me of it. You can’t take all the hurts of the world onto yourself!”

“No, and I don’t want to. But there was a clear choice here - you, and me, and those two little idiots, in a huge row - or I do something stylish and daring and get a slight thrashing. Anybody would have made that call.”

“All right, this time, I will grant you. And yes, you were very stylish and daring, though I shouldn’t tell you so. But there’ve been dozens of times -“

“Not dozens, don’t be daft!"

“Plenty of times, then, when I was the only idiot involved and the row would have been exactly the same for me as for you, and you stepped in and drew all the blame upon yourself, anyway.” His voice went a little shrill and his eyes were fixed on Crowley’s face. On his eyes. “And I just - I don’t know why you do it!”

His mouth suddenly dry and his heart beating absurdly fast, Crowley put a hand on either side of  Angel’s head, flat against the wall, straddling his outstretched legs. He heard Angel breathe in. “Don’t you really, a clever boy like you?”

Angel didn’t answer, but he licked his lips and his lashes lowered as he looked down, then up again: from Crowley’s mouth, then back to his eyes, and that was a good answer.

Crowley kissed him.

“Oh, my dear boy,” said Angel in his softest, prissiest voice some time later. “You never have to hurt yourself to get that!”

Chapter Text

So Jesus took a walk in the garden, leaving Aziraphale and the Serpent in the tomb, their hearts much recovered. The Serpent gathered all the fruits that were ripe and brought them to the Angel, that he might refresh himself, and coiled in his lap for a nap. Then came the three Marys to prepare the body, and much was their dismay when they beheld the great stone rolled away. Their cries awakened the Serpent, and he slithered under the edge of the Angel’s robe, and the Angel hid his feast beneath the shroud, so that when they entered they found him awaiting them with his hands folded, and he smiled at them, but they were anxious and angry, and demanded: “Where is the body? What have you done with it?”

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

Crowley sidled in and placed the baker’s box on the tea table. The young woman at the door held it open for the Inspector and Frank . “I told her she should have gone to you instead of waiting all day, but I was outvoted,” she said.

“Never go to the police,” said Mrs Potts, opening the baker’s box and smiling at Crowley. She looked very different than this morning, with lots of artificial color in her cheeks, curled hair an improbable shade of red, and a great deal more eyelash than she had previously exhibited. “They’ll always find you if they want you enough. More’s the pity.”

“Tossers never know what’s going on anyway,” growled Sergeant Shadwell into his tea.

“That’s because people refuse to tell us what’s going on,” said the Inspector. “We’ve lost a good deal of time through having an incomplete picture of the deceased’s life, and that time may prove to be the difference between finding the truth and being left forever in suspense.”

“Inspector, please.” Aziraphale lifted his head and turned toward them without releasing a protective hold on his sister-in-law.

“A week ago I was in Germany. My mother is Jewish. My husband is dead and I have never learned to think of policemen as my friends.” Magdala’s voice was clear and firm. A little too clear and firm - she was working hard at it, and had no doubt spent all day planning what to say to them. “I will talk to you, but I will go nowhere with you.”

“That shouldn’t be necessary, ma’am. I suppose Mrs Potts told you of your husband’s death?”

“I went straight to Anathema and Anathema came with me to break the news,” said Mrs Potts. “You said it would be in the paper, but they don’t mention his name at all.”

“That’s because we didn’t want his nearest and dearest to learn of his demise from the papers,” said Inspector Lamb. “And we’ve been all day finding out who and where his nearest and dearest are. Have we got everyone now - the Fells of Auldmon Abbey and Soho, Mrs Hostmassif of Richmond, and yourselves?”

“That is all.”

“Good, that’s something, anyway. So who are all this lot?”

“They are my friends.” She sounded defiant, which didn’t do anybody any good. 

Crowley took off his hat and set it on the arm of the sofa. His hair, in the very latest cut, was the darkest shade of ginger Frank had ever seen, and his forehead deeply lined above the dark glasses.  With a long finger he pointed around the room. “Anathema Device - this is her flat, on loan to Josh and Mags. Mrs Marjorie Potts, nice lady who knows everyone’s business. Sergeant Shadwell, grouch who also knows everyone’s business and disapproves of it. Newton Pulsifer, who keeps things running at the Soho Star Theater. I am legal advisor to them all.”

“You are?” Pulsifer sounded surprised.

Crowley stretched across the table, palm extended and flat. “Give me a shilling.”

“All right.” Pulsifer dug a coin out of his pocket and lay it in the center of Crowley’s hand.

“There. You’ve hired me, on your behalf and on your Uncle Shadwell’s. The police will want to talk to Mags now, and then they’ll probably have questions for all of you and half the neighborhood. They’ll tell you it’s everyone’s duty to assist the police. I tell you that you aren’t legally obliged to say anything. I know nobody here killed Josh, so natter away about him all you like. If they ask you about anything not related to him, tell them to go boil their heads.”

Aziraphale sighed. “Crowley.”

“I assure you we’re not presently interested in things like immigration status, custom violations, the keeping of disorderly houses, indecency, petty theft, or anything less than murder, insofar as they pertain to anything other than murder,” said Inspector Lamb.  “Though anybody who killed him to cover up anything like that will find they’ve wasted their time, for it will come out now, whether we’re interested or not. I will want to speak to each of you alone, because it saves time and confusion if people aren’t all yammering at us at once correcting each other, and the sooner the better. Is there a room convenient to the purpose?”

“There’s a small room between the bath and the bedroom,” said Miss Device. “I use it for writing. Will that do?”

“I think it needs to. Come along, Abbot, let’s take a look at it.”

The room, probably intended by the builder as a dressing room, contained a desk with a typewriter, a chair, and a bookcase stuffed with books on a variety of subjects, including spiritism, fortunetelling, land surveying, astronomy, the history of dress, cooking, toxicology, British jurisprudence, and the Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration. With a little maneuvering, they were able to fit two of Miss Device’s spindly dining chairs in as well, with space for Frank to sit penned up at the desk taking notes (the typewriter having been banished precariously to the top of the bookcase), blocked in by Inspector Lamb’s chair, which would be further blocked in by the occupant of the third chair. “Very well. Let’s hope the building doesn’t catch fire while we’re at this. We’ll take Mrs Fell first. The rest of you sit tight and enjoy your tea as well as you can.”

Aziraphale let go of Mrs Fell at last. “Don’t be frightened, my dear,” he said. “The worst has already happened, after all.”

“There is always worse that can happen,” was the resigned reply.

Once they had fit themselves all in, rather like a jigsaw puzzle, with the back of the Inspector’s chair right up against the side of Frank’s, in the interest of leaving room for the informant to breathe, Crowley almost shut the door behind them, and the interview was ready to begin. Presumably he was lurking outside, being a solicitor, while allowing them an illusion of privacy. “I’m sure you have a great many questions for me,” said Inspector Lamb. “And I’ll do my best to answer them, but I will need you to answer mine first. All right?”

Magdala Fell folded her hands in her lap. A wedding band shone on her finger, bright against the swarthy skin. “No,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter. Possibly I will never be all right again. But I will - cooperate.”

“Good. I appreciate it. I understand this is very difficult for you.”

“Difficult. What a small, delicate word. But yes. Let’s call it that.”

She’s not only grieving and shocked, she’s angry, Frank realized, as he noted down her particulars: Magdala Fell, born Magdala Hoffman in Dusseldorf, Germany, educated in Germany, Switzerland, and England, presently employed to act in a play written by Miss Anathema Device, to be performed at the Soho Star Theater. She’s keeping it in check but she could go off like a bomb any moment. Let’s hope we get something useful out of her before she does.

“When did you marry Mr Joshua Fell?”

“October 16 of this year. In Hamburg. It was what you English call a registry office wedding. My parents, my sister, my husband’s brother Aziraphale, and our solicitor, Mr Crowley, were witnesses.”

“And when did you come to England?”

“October 25. It took that long for Mr Crowley to get the visa. Many people want visas and the offices that provide them are busy refusing to do so, but it is hard to argue with a woman applying to live in her husband’s country with her husband. Especially when her own country does not particularly want her.”

“I see.  I hope you will excuse a rather personal question -“

“I am used to answering personal questions. Yes, getting a visa was an important element, both in Joshua’s proposal to marry me, and my decision to accept him. Having a British citizen in the family should be useful in getting many people away from the situation in Germany if, as we expect, it gets nastier before it gets better. Shortly before I left I learned that my uncle has been arrested. I don’t know where he is. No one does. This sort of thing - this fear - invades every part of a life. You cannot decide what to eat for breakfast, without considering whether this or that option will make you safer or put you in more danger. But it never becomes the only motivation. The visa is important. But so is - so was - Josh. He was sweet and funny and stubborn and had a quick temper which he never lost with me. I met him because he lost his temper at some brownshirts who were having fun with the Jew girl trying to get to an audition on time. They beat him up. I missed my audition to put a raw steak on his black eye. I loved him.” She blinked rapidly. “Everyone who knew Josh loved him. Except, apparently, one.”

“Have you any idea who that one was?”

She shook her head. “If this had happened in Germany, everyone would know who had done it and no one would ever be brought in for it. Here? Where beating people up for not being Aryan enough does not happen every day? Where murderers are often caught and hanged even if they are Aryan, even if they murder non-Aryans? I don’t know.”

Inspector gave her a little time to get control of her face again before asking: “Did he ever mention being afraid of anyone in England? Or even, mention someone he had a quarrel with, but didn’t fear? Someone in an organization he was part of, perhaps, with whom he had a serious disagreement?”

“No. The whole point of coming here was, that we had nothing much to fear here.”

“Perhaps there’s an old quarrel that he never mentioned to you.  Was there anyone in Germany - in Europe generally - who might hate him enough to follow him here?”

“No. No. No. There’s no one. I can think of people who might order his arrest if they had the power, but no one who would pursue him and explode his face off!” She fumbled for her handkerchief. “I’m sorry -“

“Take your time,” said the Inspector. 

Magdala took her time. Frank’s pen made tiny circles above his notebook, feeling vaguely embarrassed that he had once considered the financial difficulties that had forced him to choose policework over the bar a significant hardship.

“Whoever it was,” Magdala said, when her voice was only slightly uneven,“it was someone he trusted. But that is no help, because he trusted so many people. He would trust thieves not to rob him, confidence men not to trick him, violent men not to strike him. And mostly, they lived up to his trust. Being around him, you wanted to be better; but more important, he made you believe that you possibly could. That you had a choice about it.”

“And so we all do,” said Inspector Lamb. “I understand he associated with a number of political organizations. Can you tell me which ones?”

Magdala blew out a breath and started counting on her fingers. Frank had heard of some, but not others, and she insisted he was not, in fact a Communist Party member. “We are socialist, not Communist! Stalin is no better in his way than Hitler in his.”

“I wouldn’t know, ma’am. Can you think of anyone who would benefit from his death?”

“You mean - who gets his property? That is me. I am his wife. I believe I now own a motorbike.”

“Property’s not the only kind of benefit. Was he - oh - in anybody’s way? Know something damaging about someone? Hold a position that somebody else wanted? Anything like that?”

“Nothing. I wish I could tell you, but there was nothing.”

Rubbish, Frank thought. There had to be something. Something he didn’t tell her. Or something she isn’t telling us.

“All right, we’ll leave that aside then. It’s always possible that this wasn’t premeditated; that somebody was responding to something that happened over the last couple of days, that you aren’t aware of, so let’s fill in the bits that you are aware of and maybe that’ll tell us where to look. When did you move into this flat?”

“Last Thursday. We had been living in an hotel. We didn’t have much to move, only clothing and a few books.”

“You seem to have made a number of friends in a short time.”

“They’re Aziraphale’s friends, so they are Josh’s friends, so they are mine, also. And I’m in Anathema’s play.”

“I see. I understand Joshua didn’t contact any of his family besides Aziraphale until Sunday.”

“Yes. He was putting it off.”

“Do you know why?”

“He was nervous. About introducing me to them.” 

“He had reason to think they would be hostile to you?”

“Some of them. Apparently. They are - I don’t know them. Only what he, and Aziraphale, and Crowley say. How they made Josh feel. Like he was still a child whose judgement could not be trusted and every choice he made was wrong. And I - I am a German, and half a Jew, and an actress, and a socialist, and this family is old country manor English. They have a pedigree, like prize dogs. If they already think all his choices are wrong, they will think I have proved them right. But we made a plan. He would go up to the old country manor, by himself, and he would tell the Pater all about me. He hasn’t seen the Pater for five years. He is very sick. Josh was abroad so much. The house is too gloomy to visit and his Dr Uncle Matt would never let him into the sickroom anyway. But this time, he will not leave until he gets in and, after so long, the Pater will be happy to see him and is sure to listen. They have all been telling him to get married since he was 21; well, now he has done it. If the Pater would be happy, the rest of the family would have no choice but to be happy, too.” She spread her hands. “Whether it worked, I have no information. He called Sunday to tell his brother Gabriel to expect him. He thought then he would spend the night unless things went very badly, but then someone came to the bookshop - we can see the front door from the bedroom window - and put something through the mailslot, and when we went we saw it was an invitation to a party, from the sister, so then we thought, maybe he would come down in time for the party and break the news to his sister. Maybe even take me to the party! I planned costumes for us while he was out, in case. He knew he would be tired after so long a trip, but making an appearance, that would be a good start with his sister. He was beginning to believe in it all then. Beginning to be hopeful.”

“So he was in good spirits when he set out?”

“Yes. He kissed me and said he’d call and I should go back to sleep.”

“So he left early in the morning.”

“Oh, yes. It would be - I was sleepy. Actresses keep late hours, working or not. But I think it was between six and seven in the morning yesterday that he left. Someone downstairs will know. He bought coffee and buns from them for breakfast.” She took a deep breath. “I never saw him again.”

“Never? Not even when he returned? He left the motorbike obstructing the footpath sometime between 9:30 and 10:15 last night.”

“I had expected him to call, but he didn’t. But maybe I missed it. I was in the theater for part of the day. When it became clear I wasn’t going to my sister-in-law’s fancy party I went to the bonfire in the courtyard. Maybe he called then, or maybe some country telephone line was down and he couldn’t get through. I left a light on in the sitting room for him, but this morning Anathema let herself and Mrs Potts in and woke me up to tell me that the motorbike was home and a policeman had told Mrs Potts that Josh was dead.”

“So you never heard the motorbike drive up?”

“Sometimes I thought I heard a motorbike on the street and I would go look, and sometimes it was a motorbike but it was never him. But something must have been wrong, because he never would have left it where it was this morning.”

“Oh? Where would he have left it?”

“Normally he parks it in the same garage where Crowley keeps his car, but that’s in Mayfair, so he had a spot in the courtyard to park it out of the way when he was tired. Sergeant Shadwell would see it wasn’t disturbed. He would never, never leave it in the middle of the footpath like that, not for more than a minute or two!”

“So you surmise he was in a hurry and expected to be able to return to move the bike before it was a nuisance to anyone.”

“Don’t put words in her mouth,” said Crowley, through the door.

“Maybe. I surmise nothing.” Magdala leaned forward, her knuckles white on the hands folded in her lap. “But no one saw him. People are out and about here, all night. Mrs Potts would know, if anyone had seen him. Someone would tell her. I have been here, waiting, and looking in the newspapers. One of them says he was fired in the face and thrown off this Westminster Bridge but landed on the buttress. Another one says he was shot from behind and thrown into the water. There are interviews with bargemen and boys with little boats and no one says his name but they call him a Bolshevik and a bohemian and talk about Communist gangs, which is nonsense but I don’t know anything to replace the nonsense with. Will you tell me now? What happened to him?”

“Its little enough we know,” said Inspector Lamb. “But I’ll tell you what I can.” 

She listened, growing paler and more tired with every word.

“We’ll return his effects to you as soon as we may,” said Inspector Lamb. “Apart from Aziraphale, his family seem to have been completely unaware of his marriage, and he seems to have only even mentioned your existence to his sister-in-law Ruth. Can you think of any reason why, having gone all the way to Lancashire specifically to inform his family, he would continue to withhold that information? Do you know of any reason why he would take off his wedding ring and put it into his pocket?”

Mrs Fell shrugged. “Maybe to not talk about the marriage to anyone who saw it, before he spoke to the Pater? We did not discuss that; but he said more than once, he would tell the Pater first, because if the Pater is on our side it doesn’t matter about anybody else, but - he would tell.” She was clearly having difficulty controlling her voice. “They are lying, if they say he didn’t.”

“That’s certainly a possibility I’ll look into. Almost done, here, ma’am. I’m afraid it’s possible you’ll have to testify at the inquest, but I’ll talk to the coroner about it and try to make it as easy on you as possible. Gabriel identified the body from the birthmarks on his hands, so you shouldn’t have to go to the morgue.”

“All right,” said Magdala. “I’m not afraid to get on a witness stand and say any true thing, if you need me to. And I am not afraid to look also at his body.”

“That’s good. Now, I know you’re ready to be done with us, but there’s just one or two more small things.”

“Yes?”

“I presume many of your neighbors saw you leave the bonfire party. Did you see or have contact with anyone between the time you left the party and the time you were awakened?”

“No. Who would see me?”

“It’s a routine question; we have to ask. Same with the next question: Are you aware of where your brother-in-law Aziraphale keeps his service revolver and ammunition?”

“His what?” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, my English brain is tired. I keep wanting to think in German, and there are English words I never use. Service -?”

“Revolver. The small gun he brought back after the War.”

“Aziraphale never talked about the War. Why would he keep a gun?”

“I believe Gabriel Fell wanted him to keep it on hand in the shop in case someone tried to rob the place.”

“That would be stupid. I can’t imagine Aziraphale shooting anybody. But - I suppose - he was a soldier, he must have done. But that was all years ago. You cannot think that Aziraphale shot Josh!” The weariness pricked to alertness under the spur of indignation.

“I don’t think anything, ma’am. Just ticking things off a list now, and that’s the last item. Perhaps you should go have a nice lie down. And send your brother-in-law in, please.”

“Yes, sir.” She rose with visible effort, and dragged herself to the door, which opened for her, apparently of itself, and closed behind her, cutting off the muffled voices and clink of china faintly audible down the short hall.

Inspector Lamb sat back in his spindly chair, which creaked. “Now there’s a woman being tried to her limits! What do you make of her, Abbot?”

“For what it’s worth, I believe her and I wouldn’t be her for any money,” said Frank, laying down his pen and stretching his hand.

“As far as believing her goes, it won’t pay to forget she’s an actress, but the shape of the thing’s all wrong for it to be her. How and why does a woman with no car, unfamiliar with London, and starting from here, shoot this man and topple him off Westminster Bridge? If the details check out - and we’ll have to run her by the Foreign Office, too, just to be safe - even if she didn’t love the bloke, there’s no point killing the fellow who got you away from the Nazis and is planning to get your family away from them, too, until the family’s safe. That’ll be what he was pitching to Gabriel and Sandy. Not a business proposition, a rescue mission!”

“If Lord Auldmon responded to Joshua’s news with ‘actress, Yid, and boche’ I can see hot-tempered Joshua laying into him hard enough to kill a sick a old man,” said Frank. “Don’t suppose you like the theory that Gabriel and Sandalphon followed him to town, abducted him off his doorstep, and threw him off the bridge in revenge for patricide?”

“Oh, that’s a beaut,” said Crowley, swaggering in and slinging himself into the empty chair. He had far too much limb for the space, but appeared completely unabashed at bracing one foot against the rung of Lamb’s chair between his solid police-issued boots and another against a handy wall. “I love that theory. Aziraphale won’t care for it, but he’s not going to like any outcome we get. This one would require Lord Auldmon to be dead, but honestly he’s about due anyway. Some situations have no good resolutions. ” He reached into the inner breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out a cigarette case and a lighter. “Probably even Gabe and Sandy would have thought to mention it if dear old Pater’d died, alas. Smoke?”

“We told Mrs Fell to send in Aziraphale,” said Inspector Lamb.

“Suit yourself.” He held a cigarette rolled in charcoal colored paper in two fingers as he snapped the case shut again and tucked it away. “Aziraphale has only just now eaten enough croissants to calm him and is being tempted by jam buns. By the time he gets through that and another cup of tea he should be in a fit state for interrogation, but till then, you’re stuck with me.” He lit the cigarette and did a remarkable job of looking at them earnestly over the curl of smoke, for someone whose eyes were still invisible behind round black lenses. “And yes, I know, I’m annoying and you want to talk to Aziraphale. No one can blame you for that. But he has been through more switchbacks in the last half hour than you’ll find at a fun fair and if you try to talk to him about his baby brother’s murder while he’s still hungry? He will shatter into tiny pieces all over this room, and then everyone in the next room will blame you and turn into hostile witnesses, even though every one of them wants you to catch whoever it was and hang him as high as the moon. Sorry. That’s how it is.”

“Come now, Mr Crowley. Your friend’s not made of glass.”

The cigarette smelled expensive. Frank looked around for an ashtray to pass to him, but the room contained none.

“My friend is the strongest person you’ll ever meet, but lightning splits the mightiest oak. He’ll be better able to answer your questions after he eats. Upper lip as sstiff as ye like. Whatever that means. Never undersstood it meself.” Superficially he was using the businesslike tone, but a lisp and a hint of an accent were creeping into his voice now. “It’s the lower lip does all the work. Idioms! Ssilly things. Go on, then, detective boy, take my vitals down. Anthony J Crowley, Number 5 Georgian Terrace Flats, Mayfair. What do you want to know?”

“You don’t seem particularly cut up over this sad affair,” said Inspector Lamb.

“That’ll come later,” said Crowley. “Josh was the closesst thing I’ll ever have to a little brother, but he wasn’t my brother. Aziraphale and I have an arrangement - we’re both broken, in our ways, but we manage well enough mosst of the time. Until we don’t. But we’ll be all right, as long as we don’t both break down at the ssame time. You ssee? One of uss has to hold things together enough to keep things ticking along when the other one hass to collapsse. Clearly, thiss time, Aziraphale has the ssuperior right of collapsse. Once he’s ssafe on ssolid ground again, I can get blind drunk and cursse God all I want. Probably tonight after he’s gone to ssleep. Which means I get to meet a client and send Josh’s will to probate while hung over tomorrow, won’t that be fun?” He blew a smoke ring. 

“You’ve known the Fells a long time?”

“Since the first day at school. I was a  charity boy - Prince Scholarship, very good one, but that doesn’t make any difference to schoolboys, does it? But Angel was a good egg. We got along. Angel’s what we called him at school.”

“Another name?!” The Inspector sounded tired.

“Schoolboys,” said Frank. “Those names stick like glue. If a suspect ever addresses me as Fug, you’ll know where he was educated.”

One corner of Crowley’s mouth quirked, barely perceptibly. “My condolencess. Anyhow. Known Josh ssince the first time Angel invited me to visit during hols. Ssweetest kid you ever met in your life. Hence, Lamb. Cherub at sschool.”

“Really?” Inspector Lamb settled back into his interview routine. “I heard he had a temper.”

“Oh, sure.  He could never get used to the fact that people are nassty by nature. All he ever wanted was for everybody around him to be kind to each other and he got worked up over it when they wouldn’t. But he was a bright lad and the contradiction of butting people in the sstomach because they were unkind did not esscape him long. He had the temper as much under control as was good for him.”

“Why would anyone want to kill him?”

Crowley blew out smoke in a long sigh, mouth and forehead looking perplexed and sad. “I don’t know. I keep coming up blank. I jusst can’t imagine it. I’ve met people who didn’t like him, because there’s nothing like going around urging people to be better than they are to put their backss up, but you don’t kill a man for telling you you’ve got too much money and should give ssome away.”

“You claim to be his solicitor.”

“I am his ssoliccitor.”

“Sandalphon Fell makes the same claim. He says he has Joshua’s will on file. Which, if this marriage is legal, is no longer valid.”

“He has the firsst will. Eight months ago Joshua wrote to assk me to draw up a new one with Mags as his chief beneficciary.”

“Was that when they became engaged?”

“No, but it was when he deccided to marry her.”

“Can you think of any reason why he wouldn’t discuss this change of will with his cousin?”

“Ha!” Crowley barked a mirthless laugh. “You’ve met Ssandy, so let’s not pretend you don’t know why! Obviously Josh didn’t want to have that converssation. We had a bit of back-and-forth about it, oursselves - had to, you know, making a will in favor of your girl before you know what her answer’ll be is something nobody’d advise a client to do. But he was old enough to know his mind and my job was to do my best to carry out my client’s wishes, not to persuade him to wish something else. Which is an element of the job Sandy doesn’t seem to grasp, which is how he lost both Angel and Lamb as clients without even knowing it. I drew up the will Josh wanted. He signed it ssix months ago when I ran over to Antwerp on another matter and he was able to meet me there. Met Mags then, too, which did a lot to reconcile me to trusting his judgement.”

“Are you familiar with the terms of the first will?”

“Oh, sure. All to Aziraphale.” He looked about for the non-existent ashtray, didn’t find it, and cupped his palm to act as a substitute, not wincing as the ash landed, but blowing gently on it.

“There were no hard feelings about this change?”

“Why should there be? Nobody expected Josh to predeceasse any of his big brothers, he doesn’t own much, and Aziraphale’s got all he needs to get by.”

“Is the second will ‘All to Magdala?’”

“Bassically. All but some ssentimental bits and bobs, and a clause providing for her predecceassing him, which putss everything back to Aziraphale again.”

“Does Magdala have a will?”

“As a matter of fact, she does. I drew up new wills for both of them, on instructions, while we were going through the rigamarole of organizing the marriage and the visa, and they signed them within five minutes of making their vows last month in Hamburg. Each other as chief beneficiary, and predecease clauses benefitting Aziraphale, for him, and her family back in Germany, for her. But if you’re fishing for a motive in the property, you won’t get far.”

“Why not?”

“Well, ‘smatter of timing, innit? Aziraphale and Josh split the capital their maternal grandparents left ‘em, right down the middle, free and clear. If one of them dies, their heir gets capital and income. And it’s not a bad sum. Not worth as much as it was five years ago, but they’ve done some careful investing, and it keeps them comfortable. Aziraphale can run his bookshop buying more books than he sells and Joshua can hop around Europe with no worries. But the wise murderer for profit would have his eye on the Soho properties, and they don’t own those until Lord Auldmon kicks it.”

“That would be a 50-50 split again?”

“Yes. Lord Auldmon and his wives and their parents worked all that out during the marriage settlement phases, very businesslike. You know about the two sets of kids from two wives, yeah?  During Lord Auldmon’s lifetime each marriage portion has a designated manager, who now the kids are grown up has had to be one of that wife’s kids, but the income goes to the estate, minus salaries to the managers, maintenance on the properties, and allowances to the children. Aziraphale’s manager for Soho. Keeps on top of the upkeep, collects the rents, sends the income off to Lancashire, and gets his double pittance in return. Once Lord Auldmon dies, though, properties will be divided evenly among the kids of the relevant marriage and the Auldmon Abbey estate has no more direct interest in them. I don’t know what the present income is off the top of my head and of course it could change between now and Lord Auldmon’s death, but the relevant properties here are a theater, six buildings with shops and flats, and the bookshop. That income’s not pocket change; plus, once they’re inherited, the properties are owned free and clear and can be sold off, razed and rebuilt, whatever. But with Joshua dying before his father - the property will all be Aziraphale’s. If Mags or her heirs were cold blooded enough to kill Joshua for money, which I’ll go bail they’re not, there’d be no urgency about it. He was actively planning to help them all get out of Germany. Why kill him practically on the wedding night? Why not wait till after Lord Auldmon died and scoop the lot? The old man’s been dying by inches for five years now. Bound to pop off any moment. What would the hurry be?”

“Maybe Lord Auldmon didn’t want his son married to a Jewish actress and intended to start legal proceedings.”

“He could start them all he wanted.‘The family are bigoted snobs’ isn’t a good reason to dissolve a marriage between consenting adults. Nor is there any prospect of meddling with the disposition of the marriage portions. He can cut Joshua out of any personal bequests he might have made, which by the way he hasn’t, not to Josh, but he can’t alter the division of his second wife’s properties. That’s an even split between Aziraphale and Josh, all the way.”

“Maybe it was someone who was willing to increase Aziraphale’s eventual inheritance at the expense of his sister-in-law.”

Frank braced himself for the inevitable anger, but Crowley tapped more ash into his palm and said: “You saw Angel get the news. You know he didn’t do it. He loves the Lamb. He extends that love to Magdala automatically. He’s not a man to kill what he loves. Not for any consideration - and certainly not for the prospect of more money later, at the expense of someone else he loves.”

“All right. We have to consider all the possibilities.”

“Well, that’s not one, so get it out of your head. Next question?”

“Do you know where Aziraphale was yesterday night?”

“Where he always is on November 5. He can’t take the fireworks - too much like gunshots, and when they start doing the big shows it’s like artillery in the distance. I don’t like that above half myself. So we go down to a place I’ve got on the South Downs. Orchard House, Devil’s Dyke, Sussex - got that down, Detective Lad? Great place for quiet. No electricity, no telephone, no neighbors. I keep a telescope down there - go when the sky’s clear, beautiful viewing. We got there Friday night about six o’clock in the evening, didn’t set foot off the property till three o’clock in the afternoon today.”

“Really? You make good time.”

“I paid for the whole speedometer on that car. I use the whole speedometer. And no, we can’t prove any of it beyond our bare words! I rent the land around the house to the adjacent landowner and  whenever we go down I make arrangements for them to lay in fuel, air the rooms, and deliver milk and eggs to the gate. I sent them a cheque for services by post last week. They knew what to do, and that we didn’t want company. They might have seen either one of us, or the smoke from the chimney, but I don’t recall seeing any of them. It’s the one place in the world I can sleep as long as I want and be really thoroughly antisocial and Aziraphale can read all day long with no demands on him. But we don’t need an alibi for him. Ask anyone you like. Aziraphale not only wouldn’t kill the Lamb, he wouldn’t be within miles of London or any other population center in England on Bonfire Night.”

“You understand that we have to check his movements anyway.”

Crowley took a deep drag on the cigarette. “Yeah, I do.” He rattled off the name and telephone exchange and Frank took them down, knowing who would be stuck tramping around Devil’s Dyke if the Inspector or someone above him decided telephone contact wouldn’t be sufficient.

“You seem to have gone to a certain amount of trouble over this marriage, traveling abroad to witness it, acquiring the visa for them, that sort of thing. Are you this industrious on behalf of all your clients?”

“Most of my clients aren’t virtually my brother. It’s nothing I haven’t done before one way or another, though. Getting a visa to get out of Germany these days can be tricky and frustrating. I know my way around a bureaucracy. Josh doesn’t. Ngk. Didn’t. Damn.” He shook his head, gritting his teeth. “Sssorry. Sssorry. Sssuddenly came up againssst it, but I can’t do that yet. Give me a moment.” He sucked in the rest of the cigarette on one breath, held it till the ash stopped glowing, then leaned across the Inspector’s knees to dump it and the handful of tapped-out ash he cradled into the wastepaper bin, and dusted his hands on a red silk handkerchief. “All right now. What’s next?”

“I understand that you allowed Joshua to keep his motorbike in your garage alongside your car.”

“Yes, what about it?”

“So you were familiar with the vehicle. Did you ever ride it, or have a key to it?”

“Tried it out a bit when he first got it, but it’s too small for me, or my legs are too long for it, one. It was only in my garage when he was in town, anyhow - he’d take it to Europe with him. Liked the freedom he had to explore on his own, regardless of when and where the trains ran.”

“Did you ever know him to be careless with it? To leave it blocking the footpath, for example?”

“No. That doesn’t sound like him a bit. Why, where’d you find it?”

“We’ll ask the questions, thank you.” Inspector Lamb went through the whole business about when he’d seen the deceased last, what plans he’d mentioned, whether he had appeared out of the ordinary or mentioned anything unusual, garnering nothing unexpected. Crowley had seen Joshua briefly on Friday when he’d picked up Aziraphale on the way to the cottage and the only apprehension expressed had been about the necessity of breaking the news of his marriage to the rest of his family. Which he apparently hadn’t done and no, Crowley couldn’t account for it. No, he knew of no reason to take the ring off, why the hell would he take the ring off?

“Sandalphon and Gabriel Fell mentioned that he brought up some sort of business proposition for them, concerning people who might have urgent reason to get out of Germany. Do you know anything about that?”

“I wouldn’t have called it a business proposition,” Crowley answered. “Rather a good idea, I thought, but it wasn’t intended to turn a profit. It might or might not have supported itself in the long run. The thing is, since Hitler came to power, and particularly since the Night of the Long Knives, people are nervous. If he’ll do that to his own supporters, the sooner the people he hates get out of his reach, the better. But they need a place to go and means to get there and some prospect of making a living, don’t they? So there’s a building for sale nearby - bit of a mess at the moment, and only half-tenanted - Josh’s idea was to buy it, fix it up, help people get British visas in various ways, and move them into the flats while they get on their feet. Rents would be nominal at first till they could support themselves properly and some people would want or need to move out once they got established but eh, it could probably cover expenses once it got going. But the expenses are a bit front loaded. Josh and Aziraphale and Mags have enough income to be comfortable, but not a lot for extras, especially since Lord Auldmon trimmed his sons’ allowances a couple of years back. Josh got the bright idea to bring the Family in, too, in some capacity. Not just financial. Connections, you know - Gabe’s factories are a major employer in Milltown, he and Sandy and Mickey and Ruth know people, and there’s lots of empty rooms and some empty cottages at Auldmon Abbey these days. Just because Lord Auldmon requires quiet doesn’t mean there’s no possibilities there. I gather it went down like a lead balloon?”

“That seems to be the case, yes.”

“I thought it would, but it was worth a try. If he’d sold Lord Auldmon on it, nobody’d care what Gabe and Sandy thought.” Crowley leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Look here. There’s something about this family you need to understand.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yes. The ruling cohort - Lord Auldmon and his brother - and the first batch of kids - Gabe, Sandy, Mickey, even poor Ruth - the important thing about them is that they’re Fells. But the important thing about Aziraphale and Josh is, that they’re Aziraphale and Josh.”

“Not sure I follow.”

“It’s like this. The Fells don’t make decisions based on their own wants or even their own welfare. If Lord Auldmon’s feeling too poorly, Dr Fell won’t let his own kids in to see him, no matter how far they’ve come, but he’ll apparently bother him about details of estate management any old time. Lord Auldmon’s word’s law till he dies, when all that shifts to Gabe, much good may it do him. Everything’s got to be in the family. They don’t even hire nurses to look after the sickroom that’s become the center of the universe, because they’ve got Ruth and her mother, that are professional nurses, and Sandy’s wife Janey, that had nurse’s training but never practiced, to look after him. Ruth’d much rather stay in town than in that old mausoleum, but nooo, it’s her duty to take her turn in the ssickroom. And she’ss not allowed to decorate the housse or invite her friends or anything, though by all rights she should be mistresss of the place and in charge of houssekeeping and entertaining. Gabe and Ssandy run themselves ragged keeping the sside up. But Josh and Aziraphale have esscaped all that. Sure, Aziraphale has to take orders about the properties he manages, but he’s a clever bastard and mostly winds up having things his own way, and nobody interferes with his bookshop. They criticize him every chance they get, and trim his income because The Estate needs cash, but by and large he’s gotten out from under them. And Josh - well, he got right away, didn’t he? Bounced all around Europe and a bit of Asia and Africa, completely out of their control, married a woman they’re probably going to consider a liability. They’re free. The other Fells aren’t. And that’s going to color everything they tell you.”

“My dear boy, I’m sure Inspector Lamb is perfectly capable of forming his own opinions about my family and how to interpret what we tell him,” said Aziraphale, opening the door.  “I do hope Crowley isn’t being too great an annoyance. I know it was my duty to come when summoned, but I couldn’t seem to stop eating and all my friends combined in opposition to my obeying, and I’m afraid I wasn’t strong enough to resist.”

“No reason you should be,” said Crowley. “They were going to want me back here eventually. You sure you’re good to talk now?”

“I think we’ve got everything we need from you,” said Lamb, “and if not we know where to find you. Kindly make way for the next witness.”

Crowley took his time gathering his limbs and wriggling out the door, while Aziraphale Fell stood back and watched him do it. His eyes were red and his cheeks were pale, but as his friend had predicted, he had placed a formal British mask over his emotions and was in full control of himself. Only his plump, well-manicured hands betrayed him, clasped behind his back as he stood, and before him as he took his seat, turning the signet ring on one little finger round and round and round. Frank started a new page of his notebook, writing down the particulars that they already had. “I’ll be right outside if you need me, Angel,” said Crowley.

“I’ll be fine, my dear.” Aziraphale flashed him a quick, faint echo of the radiant sunshine smile Frank had seen during the last moments before disaster overtook him, and Crowley closed the door, presumably to slouch against it on the other side. “Please forgive him,” Aziraphale continued, addressing both policemen equally. “This is how he handles being, being upset. He gets very protective and lays himself out to fix things, if things can be fixed, and if they can’t then he squares off against what he assumes to be a hostile world. Once there’s no actions left to take I’m afraid he’ll drink rather a lot. He was so fond of my brother, and so delighted by Magdala, who is a very charming young lady when not in dire straits, and to have everything come crashing down like this - oh, I’m babbling, I’m sorry! I do that, I’m afraid. Don’t be afraid to interrupt or, or steer me in the direction you want me to go. I don’t wish to waste your time. I’m afraid I have very little to tell you.”

“I suspect you can tell us more than you think,” said Inspector Lamb. “We’re having a fair amount of trouble putting together any facts at all. Mrs Potts sent us off chasing wild geese when she sent us to your family instead of to your sister-in-law.”

Aziraphale made a distressed noise. “Please don’t judge her too harshly for that! She’s a very kind woman, but I’m afraid her attitude toward the police is only a shade less suspicious than Magdala’s. She’s had, I believe, unfortunate experiences with representatives of the law before. So her first thought was that you must not be allowed to burst in upon Magdala unexpectedly and question her before she had a chance to absorb the knowledge that Joshua is, is gone. Mrs Potts knew that Joshua’d gone up to Lancashire specifically to tell the family about her, so she expected that giving you Gabriel’s town address would enable him to tell you she existed and bring you around again after she’d had a chance to pull herself together. I can’t think why they would have kept the information from you.”

“They don’t seem to be possessed of it.”

“Oh, but they must - Joshua wouldn’t go all the way up there and leave without telling them - but there’s no reason for them to lie - oh, it’s all such a muddle!” He sighed, and wrung his hands.

“If I may say so, sir, Mrs Potts seems very attached to you.”

“She’s attached to everyone on the block. A regular mother hen! Sergeant Shadwell is dreadfully rude to her all the time and she only laughs and makes sure he gets enough to eat and has warm socks.”

“These people are all your tenants, I believe?”

“Oh, Shadwell doesn’t pay rent! He has a room in the basement of the theater, and does odd jobs, and pursues a little, a little delusion he has that we are all being persecuted by witches - or are witches, in some cases - and he must ferret them out; but he’s harmless, really. Everyone else, yes, they are my tenants, and very good ones, too. I do hope Magdala will stay and take up the flat we had intended for her and Josh! It will be so handy for her while the play is rehearsing and running, and I’ll feel so much better if she’s under my eye, so to speak.”

“I’m sure you will. And I hope that, once they understand that our purpose is to find your brother’s murderer, all your tenants will be more forthcoming than they have been so far today.”

“Oh, dear! Have they been stonewalling you? I’m afraid a lot of them do tend to think of the police less as protectors and more as, as busybodies looking for harmless people to get into trouble over little things. I hope this foolishness hasn’t allowed the murderer to get right away! If only I had been here! I could have set an example, and I might have actually known something useful if I’d been about this weekend at all!”

“When did you see your brother last?”

“Friday evening. He and Magdala went with me to Fortnum and Masons to get the hampers for the weekend - we always ‘batch it’ at the cottage, as they say, and Fortnum and Masons do make such nice hampers, though they are a little dear - I’m so sorry, babbling again - and then we sat in the back of the bookshop and talked until Crowley came. They were, goodness, they were so happy! Joshua was a little worried about all the things he had to talk to Pater about, but he promised me faithfully to stop putting it off and really, there was no reason to expect Pater not to be delighted enough that he was finally married to smooth out any little difficulties about who he was married to, and the scheme about buying the new building - I suppose Crowley told you about that?”

“Putting together a sort of family charity for getting Jews out of Germany, apparently.”

“Yes, I suppose it could be called that. You mustn’t think, from what Gabriel said, that the family as a whole is bigoted on that subject. I was quite shocked by him, honestly. It’s one thing to be conservative, but - and Pater - well, there’s every reason to believe that Pater can be talked round to seeing the benefits, to everyone, of the plan. But anyway, to actually answer your question, the last I saw of Joshua, he and Magdala were standing on the steps of the bookshop waving us good by and wishing us a jolly weekend in the country.” He blinked and shook his head.

“So you knew of no reason for fear or apprehension on his behalf at that time?”

“None whatever. We had a great deal to look forward to and were indulging in all the delights of anticipation.”

“No one had been threatening or troublesome since they arrived from Europe?”

“Not that they mentioned to me.”

“Was it common knowledge in the neighborhood that your brother had married a Jew?”

“I - don’t know. It’s nobody’s business but it’s nothing to be ashamed of, either, so it might have come up with someone or it might not. I believe - yes, Miss Device certainly knows, and other people in the theater do, also, because when Magdala auditioned she got into a serious dispute with the director and Miss Device about the inherent anti-semitism of casting a Jew as a witch, which actually persuaded them that she was perfect person for the part, but almost led to her declining it. But - oh dear - if you think anti-semitism may be behind his murder, shouldn’t we take steps to protect Magdala? Surely she would be the primary target?”

“Since learning of her I have been anxious on that question myself, but so far we’ve no solid indications of such a motive.” Inspector Lamb harrumphed quietly to himself. “Unfortunately we’ve no solid indications of any motive, so I would urge you not to leave your sister-in-law unattended.”

“Certainly not! I believe it is already arranged for Miss Device to stay with her tonight, and we can also ask Sergeant Shadwell to stand guard. He loves standing guard.”

“Er, very wise, I’m sure,” said Inspector Lamb, no doubt wondering, as Frank did, whether the old man was suitable to such a charge. “Have you any idea who might have any reason, at all, to want your brother dead? Any quarrels? Any jealous admirers of his wife? Anyone benefiting?”

“No one whatever! You can hardly say Magdala benefits, when she loses a husband. She may even lose his allowance from the Estate, though I will certainly advocate to Pater in the strongest terms for continuing it.”

“I understand that Joshua’s death doubles the property you will receive when your father dies.”

“Oh, I suppose it does, but what’s the good of that? I’d give the lot of it away - even the bookshop! - if it would bring him back! I wonder - I must talk to Crowley about arranging for Magdala to get Joshua’s half when the time comes. I’m sure there’s a simple way to do it, maybe a Deed of Gift? I have all I need to be comfortable. The only legacy from Pater I look forward to with any pleasure or anticipation is a particular book, with historical and literary value as well as sentimental associations, and that has been specifically promised to me - the Lamb has nothing to do with it.” He frowned thoughtfully. “That’s what’s so completely baffling, isn’t it? Killing him does no one any good and, random fascists aside, he simply had no enemies. But I take it there’s reason not to think robbery might be a motive?”

“Robbery seldom involves shooting a man in the head from behind, and in any case his notecase had nearly ten pounds in it. Which we will be returning to his wife in due course, with the rest of his effects. Did he know where you kept your service revolver?”

More thoughtful frowning. “I have no idea. I don’t remember ever discussing it with him, though he may have been on hand one of the times Gabriel was lecturing me about the dangers of Soho and the necessity of being prepared. I’m afraid he has a greatly exaggerated notion of the violence of London lawbreakers. The only time anyone ever broke into the shop I gave them a stern lecture and some cake and they departed without a fuss. But you can’t tell Gabriel that sort of thing! Are you all right, Inspector?”

“Your shop was broken into and you gave them - cake?” Frank fancied that Inspector Lamb was having the same difficulty he was in suppressing an astonished laugh, without the luxury of being able to bend his head closely over his notebook to hide the biting of his lip. The door, mysteriously, was silent.

“Yes. Well. They promised me they’d only done it as a lark. And I - The truth is, the theater was wrapping up a successful run, coincident with the birthday of the actor playing the villain, so they were going to throw a party commemorating both events, but the bakeshop downstairs had a difficulty with its oven which prevented their filling the order, so I volunteered to provide the cake and I got carried away. At the time I heard my burglars moving about upstairs I had just realized that I had seven cakes and some rather disastrous eclairs, far more than necessary even for the sizable party intended, and when I confronted them one of their stomach’s grumbled, and it was rather a cold night so I took them down to the kitchen where it was warm and once there it was only natural that I make tea to keep my hands busy while I delivered the lecture, and the eclairs weren’t fit to offer to a proper guest but they positively devoured them, and then they did the washing up for me. So I gave them some of the excess cake to take with them. They were very nice boys, really.” He blinked  and produced a wobbly smile. “They still come around sometimes. One of them advised Josh about motorbikes when he decided to buy one. And I’m babbling again. Why do you let me? Truly, it won’t upset me at all to be interrupted.”

Inspector Lamb only shrugged. “The truth is, sir, there’s so little to go on in this case I’m having trouble refusing any sort of information. But we were, in fact, talking about your gun. When was the last time you saw it?”

“I cleaned it, scratched PAX on the cylinder, and put it into the lockbox in 1919, and that’s the last I laid eyes on it. Haven’t opened the box since. The last time I saw the box was - oh, goodness, when was it? You may have noticed when you opened the drawer that it’s full of the sorts of things one shouldn’t throw away for one reason or another but seldom actually needs, and it was the first thing I ever placed in it, so it was right down on the bottom. I think the last time I even had that drawer open was - September? Sometime? I’m afraid I don’t remember.”

“The unlocked box was right on top when your cousin and I found it. Did you keep the drawer locked?”

“No. The most valuable things I own are books, which the general run of thieves aren’t interested in. The boys I gave cake to were after the till. It’s not my habit to lock anything but the front door and the till. I - oh!” Horror suffused Aziraphale’s round features, and he wrung his hands like dishrags. “Oh, my goodness, are you thinking he was actually shot with my gun? Of course you do - I feel so stupid, that only now occurred to me. When you were asking me about it in the shop I wasn’t thinking exactly, I was barely even hearing you, I was just - getting past your questions so we could go find Magdala.”

“The coincidence of it going missing at about the same time that Joshua was killed certainly makes it something to be looked into. These boys that burgled you -“

“Oh, they would never - and they didn’t even know I had a gun! I put a better lock on after that, so as not to be a future temptation to anyone.”

“Although we haven’t checked all the windows, there was no sign of forced entry at the door. Who ever took the gun is most likely to have been someone who had keys, such as Joshua himself.”

“Why would he have taken it? He didn’t know how to shoot. Refused point-blank to learn even when Pater caned him for it. That was hunting rifles and bird guns, in any case - no one ever tried to teach him to fire a, a revol, revolver.” Aziraphale’s voice wobbled and slid.

Inspector Lamb gave him a minute to compose himself again. “How many keys are there to the shop?”

“Let’s see - mine, and the bunch with spare keys to the exterior doors of all the properties on them that Sandy thought he should have in case of emergency. And Joshua’s. And Crowley’s, of course. That’s all.”

“Why Crowley’s, of course?”

“Because - because of course.” Aziraphale’s face looked almost preternaturally blank and innocent, as if he couldn’t believe he had to explain something so obvious. “Who else would I call if I were ill and needed help?”

“What about your sister, Mrs Hostmassif?”

Aziraphale shuddered. “Oh, good lord, no! Mickey is the last person to ever call if you’re running a fever and need someone to feed you soup and read The Railway Children to you! That would be a complete nightmare! No, Sandy, Joshua, Crowley, and I - nobody else has a key. And I can’t imagine what any of them would want my gun for! I’m sorry to deepen the mystery rather than clearing it up.”

“Never mind, we’ll get hold of the clue that will make sense of it all sooner or later. We just have to keep digging. Was Joshua in the habit of leaving his motorbike blocking the public thoroughfare?”

“Certainly not!” Aziraphale sounded indignant. “He normally garaged it with Crowley’s car, and if that wasn’t practical he’d park it out of the way.”

“Do you know of anyone else who ever rode it, or had a key to it?”

“Magdala, I suppose. And of course I have no idea who might have ridden it in Europe.”

“Do you know what organizations he belonged to?”

That netted a list a little different from Magdala’s - more things that would have to be tracked down and checked, more people who didn’t know anything to question - but maybe one of them would know something, and they’d have to wade through them all to be sure. Aziraphale had never heard Joshua mention, nor ever known him to have business in the vicinity of, Westminster Bridge, though he had once been a member of a socialist club in Lambeth. No one but Crowley had seen Aziraphale down at the cottage, he was certain, for he’d spent most of the time indoors reading the works of the Bronte sisters, which were so well-suited to reading in November. Frank’s shorthand was beginning to waver on the page, and the rush of optimism he’d had when they found Aziraphale and a surprise wife was receding by the time the Inspector released the witness and asked him to send in Mrs Potts.

“On the one hand,” said Inspector Lamb, standing up to stretch his legs and back, “depending on exactly how things are arranged down there around the Devil’s Dyke, it would be perfectly possible for Aziraphale, or Crowley, or both of ‘em together, to drive up to town, meet with Joshua by prearrangement, induce him to abandon his motorbike, take the gun, drive him to Westminster Bridge, shoot him, drop him over the edge, drive back to the cottage under cover of night, and finish off the Brontes and the stars and the Fortnum and Mason’s hamper in a leisurely fashion before driving into town again to alibi each other, with no one the wiser. On the other hand - why the devil should they? If somebody doesn’t bring me a motive sometime soon I’m likely to run mad.”

“Something must have arisen between the time he left Auldmon Abbey and the time he arrived at the bookshop,” said Frank. “Something upsetting that made him want the gun and had him in such a tearing hurry he didn’t bother to put away the motorbike.”

“And then he locks the door neatly behind him and hoofs it instead of getting that tearing hurry back onto the motorbike?”

“Perhaps somebody with a car abducted him on the way out the door?” Frank checked himself. “Neatly locking the door behind him. And with nobody noticing it.”

“During the bonfire and fireworks in the courtyard there’d be a good chance of nobody seeing it. Besides, we don’t know that nobody noticed anything. We only know that nobody would say anything this morning.” Inspector Lamb sighed heavily. “We’ll need a proper canvass, once word’s spread that we’re looking for a murderer, not trying to get the nice landlord into trouble.” He shook his head. “Giving cake to burglars!”

“That’s just what our Mr Fell is like, dearie,” said Mrs Potts, bustling into the room with a cup of tea in each hand. “Now, I didn’t know just how you like it, so I hope I haven’t got it wrong, but based on my experience of coppers, they’re both brewed very strong and have milk. This one’s two sugars and this one’s three.”

“Two, please,” said Frank, a little desperately; for he was beginning to feel the lateness of his tea severely. 

Mrs Potts set one cup and saucer down on the desk and handed the other to the Inspector, then produced an ashtray from the pocket of her voluminous housedress, which was lavender with a pattern of cabbage roses in various improbable colors. “And Anathema thought you’d better have this, too, in case you want to smoke and in any case you’ll need it if you’re going to talk to Shadwell. And now we can all be comfortable!” She saw down with a girlish flounce. The tea was very strong, but not quite stewed. Frank felt much better.

“This is very thoughtful of you, Madam Tracy,” said the Inspector. “And here I thought you despised policemen.”

“I despise nobody, but you can’t deny, a policeman’s little better than a paid busybody a lot of the time and certainly not someone you want to have waking a poor bride up to tell her she’s a widow! How was I to know Mr Fell’s family wouldn’t send you to her right away? I only wanted time to break the news and let her dress and wash her face!” She crossed her arms with an air of defiance. More like a robin than a sparrow, thought Frank; and hearing her professional name hadn’t made her turn a hair.

“I’m sure it had nothing to do with the disorderly house you keep. Does your landlord know where his rents come from, by the way? I didn’t like to ask him, as I thought he’d had enough shocks this afternoon without that, if he didn’t.”

“Nothing’s disorderly about that house, and it isn’t mine the way you mean. The girls keep all their income, and the flats are all spick and span, with a charwoman comes in on Wednesdays to do the rough, and no one takes gentlemen callers without an appointment, which, granted, I sometimes help with making them. I’ll tell you what it is, Inspector. A girl’s got to make a living, and in these hard times there’s only so many livings to get. I’m a bit past it myself - knees aren’t what they were - and most of my income these days comes from giving readings and seances - by appointment, again, as that’s how you get a really good clientele. Give satisfaction to the right people, get good word of mouth, and soon you’ll be as busy as you like. I’m teaching some of the girls to draw aside the veil, so they’ll have something to fall back on, too.”

“Does Mr Fell get a cut of any of this business? And do his family know about it?”

“He’s not pimping for anyone, if that’s what you’re asking, though I suppose people of a certain kind might think he does, for he and Shadwell have more than once had to show someone the door, who thought he could move in and lord it over us in that way. Mr Fell’s a very good landlord, very understanding. He used to live in the worst flat of the lot, back before he opened the bookshop or modernized anything, so he knows what it’s like. Lowered the rent after the Crash and pays the electric and gas himself, not like these stingy places that make you put a penny in the geyser if you want a cup of lukewarm water in your bath. He knows the tenants I bring in - for yes, I do, when there’s a vacancy, generally have a girl in mind who needs a place - are clean and don’t make disturbances and would be in a bad way if they were ever turned out. As for what his family knows, I don’t know, do I? I always make myself scarce when that Gabriel drops in, or that toady of his, the cousin, and then go round for a cup of tea and a gossip afterward, for Mr Fell’s generally a bit upset after and wants soothing. I never met any of that family to talk to except the Lamb, and I barely know him. What he knew, I’ve no idea. He took no interest in the property at all. He was almost always gone on the Continent or up north or in Wales, then popping up for a few days to a week and heading off again. Beautiful manners, he had, though when he was here he was likely to be putting up posters or speaking in halls or something.”

“Speaking in halls? You mean politics?”

“I suppose. He asked me to help serve tea at one that was short handed once and I obliged. Everybody else was talking about unions and wages and the parasite class and that sort of thing, and they got a bit stirred up, but when his turn came he talked about non-violence and those in need taking care of each other and how posh people need to be made to see that upholding the rights of the rest of us is in their best interest, too. Very reasonable and calming and never going to happen, poor love.”

“Did you notice anyone at this meeting he seemed to have a serious dispute with?”

“No, not at all. They chaffed him for being an innocent and he took it all in good part. I know sometimes he was at meetings that got broken up, but no one ever came looking for him thirsting for his blood or anything like that. The only person I ever heard raise their voice to him, myself, was that Gabriel.”

Frank felt his ears prick up, and thought the Inspector’s did, too.

“You heard him quarreling with his brother, Gabriel Fell?”

“Not quarreling, exactly. I was just popping out of the bakeshop and they were coming along the street, and I heard Gabriel say something loud about somebody interfering with his workers and he wouldn’t have it, and Joshua said they weren’t his workers, he didn’t own them, and for pity’s sake stop shouting and let it alone or he’d get Aziraphale all upset. But that must have been a couple of years ago now. I only remember it because it was so surprising for them both to be in Soho at the same time and for anybody to shout at the Lamb.”

“I see.” The Inspector sagged, disappointed. “So you’re another one who doesn’t think Joshua Fell had an enemy in the world.”

“In the world, he might have, for all of me. I don’t know what he got up to abroad. But around here, no, there was nobody.”

“Did he ever hang about your girls at all?”

“They’re not my girls! They work for themselves. Though I do let some of them use my telephone, that can’t afford the charges and don’t want to use the public one in the downstairs hall, where anyone passing on the street might hear them. He was a friendly lad and I think he talked to some of them about working conditions sometimes? But I never noticed him having a particular friend among them.”

“Hmph. And wouldn’t tell us if you had, I suppose.”

“It wouldn’t seem to be my place. I’ll tell them you’re not looking to interfere in their business, so anyone who does know anything isn’t afraid to come forward, and I hope I’ll do right in saying so, for if any of them got into trouble along of this -“

“On my word, we’re only interested in the murder. As long as no one’s in danger we can overlook just about anything else in the interest of clearing this up.”

“Well, that’s good to know and I’ll be sure to tell them.”

“Thank you. Now, as to recent events. When was the last time you saw Joshua Fell?”

“He and Maggie were walking arm and arm into the court on Sunday night, when I was letting in some sitters. I suppose they were coming back from eating dinner out. I do a special seance on Sundays, so my regulars can have an after-supper chat with their departed loved ones, as they used to do in life, so I had my mind on other things, but we waved to each other and wished each other good night. And that was the last I saw of him.”

“Did you by any chance see the motorbike last night?”

“Yes, I did, when I left the party, about half after midnight. Maggie’d gone in awhile before, and I remember seeing the motorbike and thinking that she’d be glad to have him home again, but what a shame it was that they didn’t get to go to his sister’s party.”

“You hadn’t heard it arrive?”

“No. We were being rather noisy at the bonfire.”

“He would have had to go into the courtyard to get to the door to the flats, though, wouldn’t he? There’s no street entrance.”

“Why - so he would, Inspector.” She frowned, thinking. “And he wouldn’t have known she’d left, would he? He should have walked around the bonfire once looking for her, if he came home while it was still going on, yet I never saw hide nor hair of him. That’s very strange!”

“Did you happen to notice if the bookshop had any lights on?”

“Oh, no, and we would have, too, for it’s always closed and dark on Bonfire Night. If there’d been anything different about the shop it would have been burglars and we would have fetched Shadwell and Newt and gone in after them.”

“Much better call the police in such a case.”

Unless you have a surfeit of cake to give away, thought Frank, wishing he had more tea.

“I don’t see why.”

Inspector Lamb sighed, but did not pursue the matter. “Very well, madam, I believe that’s all, thank you. And if you can spread the word in the neighborhood that any policemen coming around asking about what happened during that time are only interested in establishing what happened during the last hours of Joshua Fell’s life, in the interest of apprehending his murderer, that would be very helpful.”

When Mrs Potts left the room to fetch Miss Device, she took the empty teacups with her. “If she’d been that chatty this morning we’d have been a lot further along now,” grumbled the Inspector. “I’m ready to believe that all she’s told us is the truth, but I wonder if she’s told all she knows yet.”

“I feel like something she said was wrong, or inconsistent, or something,” said Frank. “A discrepancy with something else we’ve been told. But damned if I can pinpoint it.”

“Go over your notes after the girls transcribe ‘em in the morning and likely you’ll spot it. If people will talk to the canvassers it’ll all come together. You’ll see. Ah, Miss Device! Thank you for accommodating us. We’ll be out of your way as soon as we can.”

“Take as long as you need, Inspector.” Miss Device sat down, sitting up very straight, with her feet crossed at the ankle and tucked under the chair. She was about the same age as the deceased, rather pretty, with an air of forthrightness, and clothing and shoes that contrived to be simultaneously sensible and stylish.  Her make up was not extensive and appeared to have suffered somewhat during the course of the day. “The police and government may be corrupt, but you’re in the best position to solve the mystery. Josh was one of my oldest friends and I want whoever did this hung!”

Inspector Lamb blinked twice, and said: “Really? No one has mentioned you in connection with him, apart from your loan of the flat.”

“I’m not surprised,” answered Miss Device. “I said oldest, not closest. My late grandmother was housekeeper at the Abbey when we were small, and I often came to play with him, especially after Aziraphale went to school. But once he was sent off to be educated as a good little footsoldier in the class war - which he never became, I’m happy to say - I saw him much less often, and then after the War not at all, because Gran died and we moved to Milltown. When I declared my intention to go to London and make my living writing four years ago, my parents were very upset at first, but then they wrote to Master Aziraphale - they still call him that - and he promised them he had a very affordable flat to let and would keep an eye on me for them. I resented that, but when I got here I found the flat was really not at all bad, and he periodically writes to my parents about what a nice quiet life I live, which keeps them off my neck about the perils of London. When Josh was in town we would make a point to meet for tea or cocktails or something, and catch up, at least once, without any of his family around. When I found out about Magdala I arranged for her to audition for the lead in my play, as a courtesy.” Suddenly she seemed to take fire. “And it turned out that she’s marvelous! She’s actually been persecuted, you see, and when she read the scene where Agnes walks to be burned with her skirts full of gunpowder and roofing nails she was so angry, it was perfect. Apparently the traditional idea of what a witch looks like is also the traditional idea of what a Jewish woman looks like, because Jewish traits were grafted onto anyone society decided was evil, so she hates that she’s playing a witch. Josh had to talk her into it, because the whole point is that Agnes wasn’t evil, but kept doing good to her neighbors and enduring all their slights until they set the Witchfinders on her and then she literally blew up at them!” She stopped, took a deep breath, and subsided again. “I’m sorry. I’ve been talking about the play in order not to think about Josh all day. I felt him die, you see.”

“No, I don’t see.” The Inspector looked a bit dazed, and Frank was still scribbling to catch up, despite summarizing in police-speech and the efficiency of shorthand.

“It happened at  9:26. Didn’t it?”

“What makes you think so?”

“I told you. I felt it. Not that I knew what it was. We were dancing around the bonfire when I felt a severe pain that started right here -“ She bent forward, touching her finger to the base of her skull - “and traveled through my head to here -“ indicating a spot somewhat to the left of the center of her forehead - “and spread over my whole face. I couldn’t see or breathe for a few seconds, and stumbled so badly Newt pulled me out of the dance and brought me a drink. After that I was all right. But I knew it meant that something bad had happened to somebody, so I told Newt, and made a note of it in the memorandum book I always carry.” She blinked, her eyes huge and wet behind the magnification of her glasses. “I thought perhaps one of my parents had been injured or had a stroke, and I intended to call them. It never occurred to me, till Mrs Potts woke me this morning, to be worried about Josh.” Possibly she detected a trace of incredulity or skepticism on the Inspector’s face, for she added: “I’m right, aren’t I? That was the time of death?”

“Doctors can’t pinpoint time of death that precisely if they don’t witness it,” said Inspector Lamb, “and we can’t admit your feeling as evidence in court.”

“No, of course not. Only - I wanted to be sure, in my own mind. I know you don’t believe me, but I can tell I’m right about the trajectory of the bullet, too. The newspaper stories are unclear, but it happened just the way I felt it, didn’t it? Never mind, you don’t have to tell me. What can I tell you, that you’ll allow yourself to believe?”

“When did you see Joshua last?”

“Sunday afternoon. I needed my typewriter to fix something the director wanted changed, and when I finished they gave me tea and we talked about - plans. He’d just gotten off the phone with Gabriel after putting it off all weekend, and he told us procrastinating hadn’t been any use, because instead of going to Milltown for the work week like honest batteners upon the labor of the masses, Gabriel and Sandy would still be hanging about the Abbey on Monday.”

“Do you mean to say that Joshua was not on good terms with his brother and cousin?” 

“I don’t know anything about that, but anybody’d rather have to get past one guard dog than three. He’d hoped to only have to talk his way past Dr Fell, who is an absolute dragon about who gets in to see his lordship. My cousin Mary, who’s a housemaid there, says even the servants don’t go into the sickroom. Everything’s on the three Mrs Fells. If Gran were still there she’d have put her foot down and made them hire a couple of proper paid nurses, but the new woman they’ve got has no backbone. Thank goodness Josh’s mother talked his lordship into converting the dressing room of her chamber into a bathroom when they installed indoor plumbing at the Abbey, or those poor drudges would be running back and forth with slop buckets and hot water all the time! Gabriel and Sandy get in fairly often, I believe, but Josh hasn’t - hadn’t - seen his father for over five years. But he absolutely needed to this time and he wasn’t looking forward to dodging the gatekeepers.”

That can’t be any fun for an invalid, thought Frank. It sounds hellish up there - no one with a life to call their own, hanging about waiting for Lord Auldmon to die.

“I see. Now, somebody left the motorbike on the footpath last night during the bonfire party. We have yet to determine who, or why, but you can see that it’s an important element in reconstructing Joshua’s last hours. So I want you to think very hard about that party. Did you at any time hear anything that might have been a motorbike, or see anyone in the vicinity who looked out of place or behaved oddly? Notice anything going on around the bookshop or the entrance to the flats? Anything you can tell us could be of the greatest importance.”

“I’ll try.” Miss Device drew her brows together, in evidence of her effort. “Let’s see - the neighborhood children were due to bring their guys to the courtyard for burning around nine, so Newt and Shadwell made sure to have it all built up and ready to go by then. People started drifting in around 8:30 but it was a few minutes after nine when Shadwell lit it up and we started singing and tossing the guys in. Then the dancing, during which time I felt Joshua die, as I told you. Shadwell set off his biggest and best fireworks around ten and after that the children started to drift away and the drinking started. The fireworks had my ears ringing so I wouldn’t have heard an aeroplane take off, let alone a motorbike coming or going. People wandered in and out but they were all people I - not all people I knew, exactly, but the ones I expected. Tenants, theater people. Sometimes people walked past the entrance to the court and looked in, but I couldn’t really see them except as shadows and didn’t pay them or the passing cars any mind.”

“No sign of anyone being interested in the bookshop?”

“Oh, no, Shadwell would have made a fuss about anything like that. Mr Fell always asks him to keep an eye on the place. He takes that very seriously.”

“Were you aware that Mr Aziraphale Fell kept a gun in his shop?”

“No; and I don’t believe it now. Why should he? You know he got burgled once and he gave the burglars cake?”

“So we’ve heard. Now, I’m not going to ask you to gossip -“

“Why not? I’ve been doing it.”

Frank bit his lip again. The Inspector ignored this bit of cheek. “Normally in a murder investigation the first thing we learn is that the victim hadn’t an enemy in the world, and the second thing we learn is that his existence posed a significant problem for a fair number of people. We’ve been at this case since before dawn this morning and not gotten to the second stage yet.”

“How frustrating for you.”

“Yes, it is. Now you - you have a foot in both of the deceased’s worlds, so to speak - the family, and what the papers will call his Bohemian lifestyle. Has your cousin Mary given you any indications that anything’s happened to change the status quo up in Lancashire? Have Joshua or Aziraphale ever mentioned him running up against anyone dangerous, or being involved in the less salubrious side of his politics? Something they wouldn’t have mentioned to his wife in order not to worry her, or that Aziraphale might judge a shade too generously and overlook when talking to us? Have you any idea who could want him dead?”

“No,” said Anathema, a little too promptly. “The factories in Milltown keep cutting wages and workers, and Mary says the Estate’s getting run down and so are the people who live there, so I know things are changing in Lancashire, but - killing Joshua wouldn’t fix any of that. And - if Joshua were killed because of his political activities? It’d be because there was some big clash between factions, a riot or something, and he got in the middle of it to try to calm people down. It would be messy and loud and there’d be no mystery about it. He didn’t get involved in the kind of back room plotting that ends with people shot in the back of the head and dumped in the river. If nothing else, he never stayed in one place long enough to get caught up in that sort of thing. If I knew any names I’d give them to you, and solidarity be damned, but I don’t.”

“We appreciate that, Miss Device, thank you. I think that’s all we need from you right now. Please tell Sergeant Shadwell to step in.”

Frank laid down his pen and stretched his hand as the door closed behind her. “Whew! She’s not a type I’ve seen before.”

“Nor me, and I’ve seen the lot,” agreed Inspector Lamb, taking his pipe out of his pocket and starting to pack it. “Normally the ones that talk about sensing the moment of death and rot like that are all wispy and vague, and the ones that talk about police corruption are loud and angry. Either way they’re too busy riding their hobby horses to answer questions till we drag them out. Not but what I don’t think she’s holding something back, but nobody could say she wasn’t cooperative.”

“You don’t suppose - no, I’m tired and have started making things up.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“Well - what if she’d been carrying a torch for Joshua all these years? And then Magdala comes along and she’s out in the cold. The rigamarole about feeling the death happen at 9:26, which also gives her an alibi for that time, could be trying to lead us away from considering later times. And her description of the bullet’s path was surprisingly accurate.”

“So it was. Did she sound to you like she was carrying a torch for him?” Inspector Lamb lit his pipe.

Frank sighed. “Not particularly, sir.”

“Any notion how this idea solves the problem of his leaving the bike in the footpath and not going home? Or who took the gun?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“There we are, then. If we get any sort of evidence that points that way, we can pursue the idea, but don’t let your imagination run away with you. Ah, Sergeant, come in!”

The grizzled old man, a roll up burning like a fuse in the middle of his scowl, stood in the doorway with his arms folded.  Frank thought he glimpsed a sprawl of long black limb beyond him. “I’ll stay right here, thankee!”

“Well, well, suit yourself,” said Lamb. “We hope not to take up too much of your time, but we do want to speak to you, as you are clearly the man who knows what’s what around here. It’s always that way with sergeants, isn’t it?”

“What if it is? I mind my own business.”

“Of course you do, but you also do what’s right, and know what’s right. And when someone does wrong you’re not afraid to say so to their faces.”

“Aye, that’s true.” He leaned forward over the back of the chair, peering at the Inspector. “How many nipples ye got?”

The Inspector, with the next coaxing phrase already on his tongue, stopped with his mouth open, fussed with his pipe, rallied, and shot back: “Why do you want to know?”

“I’m the last of the Witchfinders.” Shadwell struck his own chest with an open palm. “I tried inducting young Newt, and by god he found one, but the lad’s nae got what it takes. He went and let himself get bewitched by her and nothing I can do but watch my chance. He says she ain’t got the spare nipple but I fear for him mightily for how can he be sure?” (How, indeed? Frank thought.) “That’s the mark of the witch, a spare nipple where they suckle their foul familiars. Yon dead lad, he was a witch. Nipple on each hand, he had. Mr Fell thinks they’re the marks of the Lord Jesus Christ, but that’s a papist superstition. That’s why he didn’t sink in the river, ye ken. Witches float because God’s pure waters reject them.”

No, thought Frank. This can’t be happening.

“I see,” said the Inspector, feeling his way. “And what did you do, when you realized this?”

“What could I do? I knew he ought to burn, but I dinnae have a proper army to back me up anymore and besides he’s Fell’s wee brother. So I took the matter to Crowley, some time ago, and he knew all aboot it. Y’see, Joshua’s not the main part of the name. The first part’s Raziel and that’s an angel and that’s nae accident! He was born with they witchmarks, but their mother saw them and rather than cast her bairn into the fire she put a protection on him, so as to block the witch spirit from rising in him and taking him over. Ye canna blame her for that. Mair women should be sae wise. She called the angels Raziel and Aziraphale to watch over him and keep the witch from rising in him, and a fair job they’ve done. I know it sounds a bit like popery, but witches deal with demons, so it’s only right to call angels down on ‘em. Once I knew that I let him be, but I kept a close eye out. He can’t help what he was born to be and I was powerful afraid I’d have to be the one to take him down. I dread to think what he might have got up to abroad, but around here he walked true enough, though he did hobnob with that rank witch, the Device girl.”

The Inspector leaned forward and Frank felt an electric current of anticipation. “If you had needed to take him down. How would you have done it?”

Chapter Text

Aziraphale sighed and said: “Your masters are of Hell and mine are of Heaven; therefore, we cannot walk side by side down the same road.” But the Serpent coiled itself around the angel’s shoulders and would not be moved, saying: “My masters are in Hell and yours are in Heaven, but our road lies on Earth, and behold, it is the same road. Besides, I do not walk if you carry me, which you should, for crawling on my belly and eating dust are all very well when I’m alone and no one can say that I complain, but it doesn’t half make conversation difficult. The way is long and tedious enough for both of us, without making the journey in silence.”

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

Gabe’s wedding took place early in the Long Vac. Crowley was not part of the event, and had not expected to be allowed to start his visit in time to be present at it, for his impression had been that the Prince Foundation thought he still needed to knock a few edges off prior to starting University. A Wedding, however, was considered an Opportunity, and he was not to be the only Prince Boy there. Ligur, who was a stockbroker in London these days, and looked it, was an usher.  “Fell Major thinks well of himself for having me,” he sneered, “and besides, enough of his true friends are in America or the colonies he’s come up short. I’m doing him a favor.” So they were fitted with suitable outfits and sent up to Lancashire together on the train after Crowley had been only a week at the Foundation, mostly involving tailors, not only for the wedding, but for the clothes necessary to cut a proper dash in London when he started University next term.

“Bolt?” Ligur threw back his head and laughed when briefed on the at-home nicknames on the train.

Crowley shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I never cared enough to find out. The sister’s Mickey when they talk about her, but she’s proud as sin, so if you go to first names she’d better be Michaela unless she tells you otherwise in so many words. Till then she’s Mrs Hostmassif.”

“Mrs? Not Lady? She must be a bit of a fright if she had to trade down.”

“Depends on what you want, doesn’t it? She snared a naval officer with a private income. Maybe she didn’t get any better offers; but Angel reckons she wanted maximum freedom more than a title. Angel’s Sunshine to his family but he doesn’t like it.” Ligur wouldn’t care what Angel wanted, per se, and Crowley didn’t dare tip his own hand about what he cared about. They were Prince Boys laying siege to the world of titles,  privilege, and fancy houses: that was the line to hold in present company. “Stick to Aziraphale unless you think a well-timed Sunshine’ll win you points with Gabe.”

“A-zir -“

“A-zir-a-fale. It’s not that hard. If Gabe or Sandy says it they come down hard on the last syllable so it sounds like Azira-fail, but properly the stress is on the second syllable, so watch that unless you’re deliberately being a prat.”

“So Sandy’s still Sandy.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Oh, I can handle him all right. Shame I couldn’t bring Froggy - he could take the blighter off to talk rugby and leave me to only deal with the grownups. But otherwise he’d be completely out of his element, so I’ll have to make do.”

Aziraphale and the Lamb met them with the pony trap, which the Lamb drove tolerably well, taking great pride in his ability to handle the elderly cob between the shafts. “She doesn’t like to move much these days,” he explained, “but she’ll step out for me, won’t you, girl?” He chirruped and slapped the reins and she did, indeed, step out - with more fuss than speed, but after all, what was the hurry? Lamb’s year at school, where he was generally known as Cherub, had left him looking a bit pale and stretched out, but the perpetual angry lines his face had acquired, rubbing up against the routine injustices of the school system, had already smoothed out after a week of home comforts. The birthmarks on his hands had weathered a little as he grew away from waifish childhood and toward ungainly adolescence.

“The house is full to bursting,” Aziraphale reported. “The first floor is almost completely taken up by the bridal party. Mr Ligur, you’ll be on the second floor with the rest of the groom’s men, in what we call the Wainscot Room, as if they didn’t all have wainscot, but you’ll understand when you see it. It’s a little dark but on the other hand it’s right next to the lav on that floor. The door beyond the lav leads into the west wing, which is dangerous and you shouldn’t go in, if you don’t mind. There’s nothing there but mice and some historical dry rot anyway.”

Ligur chuckled. Crowley hoped he imagined the condescending edge to the sound. “Is historical dry rot posher than modern dry rot?”

Aziraphale primmed up his mouth and crinkled his eyes. “Of course it is! I don’t think it goes back quite to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, but it’s not any common or garden upstart rot, either.  Every year since I can remember, we either need every penny for present expenses, or have a choice between dealing with the west wing or improving something that matters. Plumbing the tenant cottages or upgrading the factories or whatnot.”

“That is the downside to a great estate,” said Ligur, all sympathy.  “They need cash, and lots of it, and the old ways of getting it aren’t adequate anymore. It takes a long-term investment plan and a close eye on the markets to get ahead. Who’s the family’s broker?”

“No idea,” Aziraphale admitted. “Unless it’s the bride’s father, but the Wingardes are based in Boston. I’m sure he’d love to discuss the British and international markets with you. He certainly goes on about them after dinner enough!” 

So that’s Ligur’s job for the weekend settled, thought Crowley with some satisfaction. “If it’s that full, are we all to be crowded together in the Little Room Next to the Nursery again? Because it will be a crowd this year, all the leg there is on the Lamb now.”

“You two are,” said the Lamb, in a voice of weary responsibility. “I am in charge of the Nursery Brigade and have to sleep among them. Please call me Josh in front of them - I refuse to have people who still sleep in a cot knowing me as either the Lamb or as Cherub. ”

“Why, aren’t there nursery maids?” Crowley strove to keep satisfaction out of his voice; for it was a great burden for one of the Lamb’s mature years to be confined to the nursery again, after being so recently graduated from it. But he couldn’t be expected to be as understanding as Grimsby had proved to be (as long as they were quiet and waited until he was asleep), so the development was not a bad one for everyone.

“Oh, yes, there’s Nanny Shadwell from the village, that can’t keep up; and a very smart nanny from Boston who no one understands except the Wingarde infant and who doesn’t regard any other children as her responsibility; and Anathema, who is saddled with all the drudge work. So either six children between three and eleven will run wild, and fall into the Pond, and break into the west wing, and let the dogs into the drawing room, and get Anathema scolded for not being in three places at once, or I will keep track of them. I hope they haven’t gotten up to anything too dreadful while we were gone. I set them up for croquet on the lawn before we left to meet your train, and that should have kept them out of trouble, but -“

It had not, for some of the younger spaniels had decided that all those balls knocking about must be for their benefit and were having a wonderful time fooling the older children into thinking they’d be able to retrieve one, while a child of three who shouldn’t have been there at all solemnly made the rounds attempting to knock any ball she could find through any available wicket, wielding a mallet more than half her height with great solemnity and concentration, which involved either the ball flying beautifully off in the wrong direction with a spaniel in hot pursuit, or herself falling over and adding a new grass stain to her pinafore, narrowly avoiding knocking herself on the head with the mallet. Observing this, Joshua dropped the reins (the cob obligingly taking this as a signal to stop and watch the mayhem) and jumped down to sort things out before the party of ladies, in gauzy afternoon dress complete with gardens on their heads, coming up from the deer park, could reach the danger zone. In this he failed, for getting the mallet away from the small child distracted him from the spaniels leading the older children straight into the ladies’ path, so that Crowley, Aziraphale, and Ligur were obliged to race to intervene. 

Aziraphale called and whistled to the dogs, drawing some, but not enough, of them off to leap about him enthusiastically. Crowley scooped up the ball the toddler was attempting to hit, ran as best he could to an advantageous position, and hurled it to good effect, so that about half the remaining dogs pelted off after it. Mickey, in the lead of the endangered group, laid about her with her parasol commanding each remaining dog by name to “Down, sir!” Ligur, utilizing the skills of one whose best friend is a rugby fiend, intercepted the muddiest dog immediately before it managed to leap on the most gorgeous frock and picked it up, struggling and yelping, in the nick of time. The wearer of the frock, a stranger with the kind of beauty only wealth can bestow,  recoiled from both of them equally. Crowley couldn’t hear what she said over the delighted barking of the dogs, but he saw the laugh on Ligur’s face shut down, and legged it over as fast as he could, leaving Aziraphale in the midst of a scrum of dogs and children. “Good afternoon, Mrs Hostmassif! Mrs Vanderburg! You remember John Ligur, don’t you? From Bolt’s leaving ceremony?” He had no idea whether Ligur’d been introduced to his classmate’s sister and grandmother on that occasion or not, but it seemed plausible.

Mickey shot the stranger a look of reproof and stepped forward. “Of course I do! Thank you for saving our outfits at the expense of your own, Mr Ligur.” She rapped the dog firmly across its nose and said, with great authority: “Bad dog! You can put her down now. She’ll behave.”

Ligur did so, and the spaniel pressed her belly to the ground, looking properly chastened. “My own outfit is no matter,” said Ligur, though he looked at the mud down his front with some regret. “Mere traveling bags. They’ll clean right up and if not, what’s a tailor for? It’s a pleasure to meet you again, even in these less than perfect circumstances.”

By the time Mickey had introduced the ladies - Miss Elspeth Wingarde, the bride; Mrs Wingarde, her mother; a couple of sisters and friends - to Mr John Ligur, Gabriel’s friend who is to oblige us by being an usher, and Mr Anthony Crowley, Aziraphale’s dear friend - Joshua had come panting up, with the toddler wriggling in his arms, and no one was obliged to notice the lack of enthusiasm the American contingent had for the introduction (at least to Ligur; the youngest and frilliest of the sisters-and-friends smiled at Crowley with something resembling hope). “I’m so, so sorry!” Joshua cried. “I promise, Lily was in the nursery and the dogs were shut up in the kennels when I left to meet the train, or I never would have done it.”

“You’ll know better another time, I hope,” said Mickey, in her most repressing voice. “For pity’s sake find a stableboy to round the dogs up and then get the children presentable! Where on earth is that Device girl? It’s nearly teatime.” She appropriated Ligur’s arm with a smile whose warmth only intensified as the chill disapproval of the bridal party got chillier. “I’ll bring you to someone who can show you your room and undo the damage you so gallantly took upon yourself.” And off they went, Mrs Vanderburg (who was going deaf) talking loudly about the unreliability of nursery maids in this degenerate age.

“You get the kids,” said Crowley to Joshua. “Angel and I’ll manage the dogs. I expect the stableboy has his hands full or this wouldn’t have happened.”

By the time all the dogs were kenneled and the croquet set put away there was barely time to run upstairs and freshen up before tea; but Crowley and Aziraphale paused long enough to kiss each other silly as soon as the door of the Little Room Next to the Nursery shut behind them, anyway. Crowley was inspired to press his Angel down on the bed for a quick rub, undeterred by the noise from next door, where preparations for nursery tea did not seem to be going smoothly; but Aziraphale demurred, albeit with many giggles and kisses. “Tonight,” he whispered. “I’ll do anything you want - tonight.”

“Anything?” Crowley bore down harder and pulled Aziraphale’s tie lose. “Promise?”

“Anything we can clean up after adequately! Quite apart from not wanting to make more work, we’re not in a school full of boys anymore. The chambermaids will know exactly who made every mess, and the laundress - not that I think our servants gossip, but -“

“All right. All right.” Crowley let him up and tried to calm himself down. Aziraphale was right. They didn’t have time for the mess of finishing what he’d begun, just now. “I brought two jars of Vaseline and extra towels. By the way.”

“Extra - oh, my goodness!” Aziraphale laughed and pushed him toward the washstand. “Wash your face! You’ve got train smut all over it.”

“Some of it’s on yours now. And straighten your tie! You can’t go down to tea like that!”

Despite the handicaps they labored under, they headed downstairs looking tolerably respectable and if they were late, so were the men coming out on the second-floor landing as they reached it, Gabe and a much-restored Ligur among them. The pair hung back, hoping to pass unnoticed, but alas, Gabe was apparently in a mood. He was taller, broader, and louder than ever, and his voice had a strange new American inflection when he bellowed: “Hey there, Sunshine! What the deuce did you do to your hair?”

Aziraphale stopped three stairs up from the landing, body gone rigid, and answered: “Nothing.”

“Yeah, that’s obvious.” The other men passing, some of whom Crowley recognized vaguely from his first year at Wellborn Hall and some of whom he didn’t, laughed, but did not linger. “What happened to that Brilliantine I gave you?”

Aziraphale clasped his hands together behind him, visibly trying not to fidget.“It doesn’t work and if I try to make it work I’ll be late for tea.”

Gabe reached up and feigned punching his brother’s stomach. “So? That won’t hurt you.”

“But it but it but it would be disre, disrespectful.”

“So is showing up looking like a bird nested on your head.”

Crowley’d been prepared to accept that Gabe might have improved over his American sojourn, the previous year, but he’d been swiftly deprived of that hope then, and was already fed up of him, now. “That’s not what it looks like,” he said, coming down a step and positioning himself to loom a bit between them. “You’re just afraid if he sits with his back to the window and gets that halo effect, the bride’ll opt to change Fells. Girls love curls; it’s a universal constant.”

Most of the bluff heartiness dropped out of Gabe’s face and voice. “Oh. Hello, Crawly.”

“Crowley.”

“Unhelpful as usual, I see.” The improbably violet eyes narrowed suspiciously. “If the plan’s to upstage him you’ll be disappointed - yours may lie flat but it’s still ginger.” He turned back to Aziraphale, twisting his face into a more condescending grimace. “I guess you have to go down to tea, ready or not, but you are not looking like that on the day of the wedding, Sunshine. You’ll dress with me and my valet will whip you into shape.” He turned and bounded downstairs, catching up with Ligur at the next landing.

“All right, Angel?” Crowley asked, touching him in the center of his back. No one was looking, but - they weren’t in the Little Room, and no one ever truly knew whether a servant could see them, or not, in a big house like this. It was one of the things Old Mr Prince had warned him about, though Crowley doubted he’d been thinking about his protégé being caught being suspiciously affectionate with a male “connection” when he did. 

“Of course I am.” Aziraphale unclasped his hands and resumed progress downstairs. “You mustn’t take what Bolt says so much to heart. He’s, he’s a bit blunt but he he means well and he’s not, not wrong. My hair is a bird’s nest, as a matter of course, and I’m sure I’ll, that, I’ll be very grateful for the attentions of his valet on the wedding day. I will, I must, I’m sorry I didn’t speak up, I must have a word with him about the way he talks to you, though, there’s nothing wrong with having ginger hair and and I wish the two of you would try harder to be civil. To each other. You get your back up on my behalf quite unnecessarily and it, he, gets all kinds of strange notions about you -“

“Angel. Breathe. I promise I’ll be civility itself. But every time he criticizes you he’s wrong and you need to remember that.” And he criticizes you every time he speaks to you.

In the drawing room, tea was being served in huge quantities to a bewildering number of people. Mickey’s hostessing duties had been usurped by her Grandmother Vanderburg, who poured the tea with brisk American efficiency while locked in battle with Mrs Wingarde over the composition of bridal bouquets. Mickey and Ligur sat in splendid isolation on a blue satin couch, and Crowley wondered whether  his duty to his fellow Prince Boy might require him to do - something - but to his relief Lord Auldmon wandered casually over and sat down to ask Ligur how he did and gradually draw Mr Wingarde (a balding man with a paunch offset by a tolerably good tailor) into a discussion of stocks. Commander Hostmassif was busy discussing cricket and did not seem to notice that his wife held her own ably in this conversation. 

Crowley and Aziraphale joined a group that included Raffles-and-Ruth and the youngest and frilliest Wingarde sister, and were able to get through the afternoon without Gabe taking any more notice of either of them. He sat next to his bride-to-be, in the set of chairs best positioned for the afternoon light to show them to advantage, and they both took care to hold themselves and turn their heads in the most becoming ways as he showed her the huge plush-and-silver photo album in which the modern history of the family was recorded in stiff silver nitrate portraiture and she pretended to be interested. Crowley assumed that they deserved each other.

Raffles was in medical school now, and Ruth was studying nursing and wearing a modest sapphire ring. When congratulated on their engagement they both thanked Crowley. “We thought we’d as well get it settled now as later,” Ruth said. “The nursing students often get pestered to go out dancing and so on, and the ring is a nice discouragement to that.”

“Oh, but Raphael does take you dancing, doesn’t he? There’s no point in being engaged, if you never go dancing.” The youngest Wingarde girl - Doris, that was it - clasped her hands earnestly and looked at them with wide, eager eyes.

Ruth laughed. “Goodness, when would we have time? We eat, sleep, and breathe medicine and hygiene, and barely see each other. We take tea together every Saturday in the parlor, under Matron’s eye, and review each other’s classwork. Sunday we sit in church together. And he’s gotten me into dissections a couple of times, though some of the professors are stuffy about it.”

Doris squealed. “Oh, how horrid!”

“Some of the students have been louts, too,” said Raffles. “But she’ll have to assist at operations eventually and Ruth’s such a brick, she wins them over, you know.”

“Well, if you’re happy...” Doris looked doubtful, then took a sideways glance at Crowley. “I’m afraid I’d want more romance in my life, when I’m engaged.”

“Oh, Raffles-and-Ruth’ve always known each other,” said Crowley, who knew an invitation to flirt when he saw one, and wasn’t about to shirk his duty. If he did, she might try to flirt with Aziraphale, who was much more interested in consuming finger sandwiches. “Their standards of romance can’t be expected to match anybody else’s. I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding a fellow who’ll take you dancing and bring flowers and write poetry to your eyes, or whatever you want. Certainly you shouldn’t settle for anyone who won’t.”

It occurred to him that the Princes might regard Doris as an Opportunity, and put the idea aside. They were paying for his education, and would expect a fair amount of control of his professional life in return once he went to work for them; but setting him onto American heiresses was outside their bailiwick, and anyway American heiresses came to England to poach titles; everyone knew that. The Foundation’s lessons in making himself into an agreeable social asset would benefit him in all parts of his life, but their ability to direct him where and how to be agreeable must remain within bounds, and marrying well was not in his own personal plans. Not unless the laws changed drastically at some point in his lifetime.

Undercurrents of drama and tension ran throughout the assembled company, expressed as a cutting remark here, a tight-lipped smile there; but Crowley and Aziraphale were naturally grouped in with the guests, both Fell relatives and Americans, nearest their own age, which was not the epicenter. All they had to do was nod and make sympathetic noises when Doris complained that Mrs Vanderburg thought she could lord it over them just because she was New York, as if everyone didn’t know how loose and common that place was compared to virtuous blue-blooded Boston; let young men explain baseball and laugh at cricket to them; and pretend to be interested in the gossip of Fells whose primary dwellings were Milltown, Manchester, or the far-flung reaches of Cumbria, Merseyside, and Cheshire. The afternoon was all the more pleasant because Sandy wasn’t here yet. They even managed to miss his arrival, by volunteering to take the Lamb and the Nursery Brigade down to The Pond and oversee toy boat races. 

This naturally involved a certain amount of wetness all around, and Crowley undertook to see that most of the wettest parts involved him rather than either of the supervisory Fells, so that when they inevitably encountered a party of properly grown-up people, they were the least bedraggled. All the same, Lord Auldmon surveyed them with a critical eye. “I rather thought all my sons were tolerably mature, but it appears I was mistaken.”

The synchrony with which Aziraphale’s and Joshua’s faces lost the laughing glow they’d had a moment before twisted Crowley’s heart. “We thought we’d get all the mess we could onto the kids, before they had to keep their clothes clean all day for the wedding,” he said. “You can’t do that and not get splashed about a bit, in the process. We should still have plenty of time before the gong, if our watches are running right.”

Lord Auldmon regarded them all through a curl of cigar smoke. “I suppose it could be worse. Carry on, then. Oh, and - Sunshine, Lamb, get someone to help you with your hair!” He turned to Mr Wingarde, similarly smoking at his elbow, saying: “They both have their mother’s hair. It used to take her two or three hours a day to do hers, with a lady’s maid to help.”

“Hmph, shave it all off,” suggested Mr Wingarde. “Curls are a waste on boys. Women’ve got nothing better to do with their time, anyway.”

“Come along,” said Josh, a little too loudly, his face flushed red, “we’ll have to go up the back stair, so nobody’s mother sees us. Quick march!”

They got the children turned over to Anathema, Nanny Shadwell, and the unintelligible Boston nanny, and then Joshua joined them in the Little Room to scrub up and change for dinner, which they had enough time to do in a leisurely fashion, except, of course, for the hair issue. “I don’t know who he expects to help us with it,” said Joshua, as he fought to get his comb through his. “It’s not as if there’s stray valets lying about.”

“Don’t tug like that, you’ll break the strands and make everything three times worse.” Crowley plucked the comb from his hand. “Sit down, I’ll take care of it. Where’s that Brilliantine, Angel?”

“You may rely on Crowley, my dear,” Aziraphale told his brother, getting the jar out from behind the mirror on the dressing table. “He knows how to do it so that it doesn’t even hurt.”

“The trouble with curly hair,” declared Crowley, wetting the comb and getting to work in his best imitation of the Foundation’s hairdresser, who lived to teach callow youth the best way to fuss with their looks, “isn’t that it’s curly, it’s that people try to treat it as if it were straight. You might as well try to train a spaniel to be a guard dog as make curly hair lie flat. When you stop fighting it, it’ll stop fighting you. Hold still.”

“I’m afraid nothing but lying flat will ever satisfy Bolt,” sighed Aziraphale, doing up his cuffs before buttoning his shirt, oblivious (possibly) to the unfair effect this had on Crowley. 

“If it laid flat, Bolt’d find something else to find fault with,” Crowley managed to say around the racing of his pulse. “You’re both handsomer than him and he knows it. It drives him mad.”

That made both of them laugh. “You are perhaps a tiny bit prejudiced, dear boy,” said Aziraphale.

“Not me. I’m the only unprejudiced person in the house.” Crowley found the natural part in the Lamb’s hair, with some relief - it was a good deal further to the right side of the head than Angel’s was, and he’d started to fear it would be one of those zigzaggy ones. He was not, despite the Foundation’s efforts, the most accomplished hairdresser in their year at Wellborn Hall - that would be Eden-Fisher - but he’d had to pinch-hit enough times that he knew his way around some of the more common pitfalls, and hadn’t looked forward to combining his techniques for “extreme curliness” with those for “multidirectionality.” (Mostly, of course, he knew Angel’s hair, and his own. He was certain he could have done wonderful things with his own hair, had fashion allowed him a little more length to play with.) “What your father’s problem is, I wish I knew. He couldn’t really tell anything about your hair with your caps on, so why did he even bring it up? I don’t understand him at all!”

“He’s afraid if he tells us we did anything well, we’ll get conceited,” said Joshua. “It’s what happened to Bolt. So whenever Pater can find a fault in us, he tells us about it.”

“Oh, what a load of tosh.” Crowley considered, though, as he teased a knot out of the hair, gripping the lock with one hand just above the root, so as not to tug, and tried to remember ever hearing Lord Auldmon expressing approval of any of his children. “Has he told you that’s what he’s doing?”

“He told me,” said Aziraphale, beginning to close his shirt front at last, “that he only wants me to be the best I can, and there’s no point in telling me about what I’m doing well. If he doesn’t mention it, I am to assume I’m passing muster.”

Crowley opened his mouth to say what he thought of that, then closed it again. Maybe that’s how fathers were supposed to be. He had never met his, that he knew of, and was completely ignorant on the subject. Nor would he ever have children of his own, so he had no business thinking ill of how anyone else raised his. Except that this father’s children were Aziraphale the Sunshine Angel and Joshua the Cherubic Lamb, and nobody had any business to criticize either of them. “Do you assume that, though? It seems to me you don’t. Head Boy, three Firsts, best-looking person in the room, and you’re still fretting that something isn’t right and hoping nobody looks at or speaks to you.”

“I have never been the best-looking person in a room that had either of you in it,” declared Aziraphale; a declaration heartily repudiated by both.

Joshua only had to look presentable enough to set a good example in the nursery, as he was not to be subjected to any formal dinner except the wedding feast, but Crowley and Aziraphale had to look good enough that the ladies they were assigned to take in to dinner did not feel shortchanged, and they acquitted themselves well enough that no fault could be found. (Gabe looked up from talking to Sandy only to be visibly, if slightly, annoyed at seeing nothing to pounce on, and then turned away without speaking to them, the best of all possible results in Crowley’s book.) 

Crowley was astonished, in the time between coming down and seating, when Aziraphale introduced him to “Jane, Sandy’s wife.”  He couldn’t remember being told that Sandy’d gotten married. She was a mouse of a woman whose father and grandfather were senior partners in the Milltown soliciting firm to which Sandy was now attached. Her gown was last year’s, her posture imperfect, and she seemed to shrink from conversation, all of which seemed as likely to be a consequence of having married Sandy as part of her natural bent. Sandy spoke to her as if she were a charity boy - sharply, dismissively, and seldom - and she didn’t even bridle or turn red. The few times Crowley’s attention was diverted from his own neighbors (chiefly Doris and a cadet Miss Fell from Cheshire) to observe her she was staring at her plate, eating doggedly, while the men on either side of her talked over her head. 

Mickey and Ligur had a lively conversation into which no one else attempted to enter. Gabe and Miss Elspeth Wingarde were more involved in chatting up each other’s parents than in enjoying each other’s company, but Mrs Wingarde and Mrs Vanderburg were not to be deflected from their feud, which now seemed to involve which pieces of music were Necessary and which Excessive. Aziraphale was surrounded by Americans, who Crowley hoped understood how privileged they were to be on the receiving end of his smiles, all of which were beautiful; but not one of which held a candle to the smiles he showered Crowley with that night, when after a long evening of billiards, cards, and being amusing to people who didn’t matter they finally locked the door of the Little Room behind them.

“I’ll hardly see you tomorrow,” Aziraphale said sadly, as they rinsed out one of the extra towels afterward. “It’ll be all wedding preparations, and both the La - both Joshua and I will be at everyone’s beck and call. And then the day after is the wedding, and the day after that most of the guests will leave, and then we can finally start having a proper summer. You might have had a better time if you’d waited to come.”

“I waited as long as I was willing to.” Crowley slid his bare arms around his Angel’s bare torso and kissed the damp skin behind his ear.

Aziraphale giggled and hung the towel to dry. “You know what I mean. In a reverse situation I’d hole up in the library till sent for, but what you’ll find to do - “

“I’ll make myself useful. You reckon Nanny Shadwell and the Boston Nanny’d mind if I offered myself up as a sacrifice to the young ‘uns? I could take them off on an adventure all around the woods and up into the hills, with a picnic - remember when we did that for Josh and Ana and whatshername, the little cousin who visited that year?”

“I expect they’d fall on the offer with gladsome cries, if you would - but do you really think it wise? Could little Michael last the distance?”

“What, the five year old?  He’s not that heavy, for his age. I fully expect to be a beast of burden part of the way, and maybe I can snag myself a second-in-command. Don’t worry about me. You’re the one who’ll have a hard time tomorrow. Everyone’ll be ordering you about and if Mrs Vanderburg and Mrs Wingarde don’t get into a tug-of-war over you and Josh and anyone else in reach before the day’s out, I’ll be astonished.” He rolled himself back onto the bed, on top of the crumpled sheets, and pulled Aziraphale with him, to lie curled up into Crowley’s side with one leg over. The night breeze from the open window was cool on their sweat, and Aziraphale’s much-maligned hair was a lovely tousled mess.

“It’s our duty, we’ll have each other, and it’s only one day. Well, one and a half, I suppose. I’ll have lots of duties on the actual wedding day, too. But at least, on the wedding day, when I’m not actually holding a station, we’ll be able to find each other and a quiet corner and amuse ourselves. I wish we could dance together.”

“So do I, but we’ll both have a duty to prevent wallflowerdom. Someday, I’m going to a dance with you, and I’ll wear a long black gown, and a tall black headdress, and everyone will wonder who the mysterious lady is, dancing with you.”

“Oh, my,” murmured Angel, into the hollow of his throat.

The next day was strenuous for both of them (as well as Ruth, who cheerfully volunteered to go adventuring, and tramped all day long, identifying flowers and butterflies and twice preventing Crowley from leading everyone down a wrong turn) and they didn’t need the extra towels and Vaseline that night; but just the sensation of flopping into bed, both of them exhausted, was enough to make Crowley feel replete with contentment. This was how life should always be - coming together at night, regardless of what different directions their daily activities took them in. Angel, however, seemed subdued, no doubt due to being subjected to the strictures of his family all day, with no buffer. “All right, Angel?” Crowley asked, lifting the hand lying open and vulnerable against his own chest, and kissing it.

“I’m right as rain. But I wish...they’re so hard on the Lamb.  He’s so young and everyone expects so much of him! As if he has to be all grown up now, just because the rest of us are.”

“They treat him the same way they’ve always treated you. I’ve always said they had no business to.  Easier for you to see when it’s someone else, I suppose.”

“It’s not the same, though. They’ll - nobody physically pushes me around, even though by now I’ve probably outgrown the, ah, the emesis problem, as Raffles so tactfully puts it. But the Lamb never was sick on anybody, even as an infant, and nobody thinks twice about poking him to make him stand straighter or pulling him into line or - Sandy backhanded him, once, and when I protested nobody seconded me. Even Raffles shrugs and thinks it’s normal. And Joshua hates it but he’s resigned.”

“Well. Now you know how I feel.”

“It’s not as bad as seeing you caned for me -“

“Which is all behind us now. Too big to cane, we are.”

“Joshua’s not.”

“And he’s a good boy. He won’t be caned. Shhh. You can’t do anything about it tonight. Tomorrow’s a big day.”

“Yes, you’re right. I need to rest so I’m in proper condition to do my bit to make Bolt’s big day perfect.”

Gabe doesn’t deserve a perfect day, Crowley thought, but didn’t say. Saying things like that did no good.

Angel looked beautiful in morning dress. Everything else about the wedding was secondary.

Crowley worked the crowd in the intervals between Aziraphale and/or Joshua being free, doing his best to be amusing and to intercept disasters. Well, some disasters. If he saw one coming and it looked more funny than disastrous to anyone who didn’t deserve to be humiliated, he’d either leave it alone or give it a push. Something had to add interest to large ceremonial occasions, and poor Jane Fell looked positively grateful when  the dog escape diverted Sandy from whatever he was lecturing her about. 

Shortly before time for the dancing to begin, Crowley - engaged in telling Doris and another bridesmaid a school story suitably edited for the audience - spotted Gabe talking to Mr Wingarde and looking toward them. Ah. He made eye contact, smiled, and wiggled his fingers in a little wave. When Mr Wingarde excused himself from Gabe and made a beeline for Mrs Wingarde, he wrapped up the story and added: “I see I am being exposed,” nodding at the Wingardes, with their heads close together, looking over at them.

“Exposed as what?” Doris asked.

“A charity boy,” Crowley admitted, smiling easily. “A very high-quality charity boy, mind you. The Prince Foundation won’t take anybody they don’t think they can make over to pass for a gentleman, and there isn’t a one so far that’s let them down. Though I suppose I might be the first.”

“Certainly not! I’m sure you’re as gentlemanly as, as anybody. Oh! If Mama forbids me to dance with you I’ll, I’ll - well, I’ll dance with you anyway!”

“I’m sure she won’t be so ill-mannered as that,” said Crowley. “But it’d hardly be gentlemanly for me to encourage you to disobey your mama, would it?”

“I’m sure you’re borrowing trouble,” said the other bridesmaid. “If Gabriel doesn’t think you’re a gentleman, he wouldn’t have invited you.”

“No more he did.” Crowley was rather proud of how relaxed and unconcerned this was coming out sounding; glad, also, that Angel was across the room trapped between two relatives, where he couldn’t hear and start to sputter indignantly in front of his potential dance partners. “Aziraphale asked his father if he could invite me and another friend of ours, and Lord Auldmon, presumably calculating the probability of having wallflowers among his relations, told him he could. Unfortunately Grimsby’s started a job in an import house and couldn’t make it. I’ll be earning my keep tonight, though I hope I’m not entirely limited to the wallflowers and you'll both oblige me once or twice. It’s not as if this is a big Society do, with everybody calculating their worth in the marriage market. I couldn’t get a look in at something like that, and wouldn’t try. But a simple country wedding like this one - well, no one should have to worry about anything but having a good time, should they?”

“No, they shouldn’t!” Doris declared roundly. “It’s so, so snobby and unromantic, caring about things like that.”

Crowley shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Nothing romantic about growing up in a big house like this and then marrying somebody who can only afford a cold water walk-up. Don’t be too hard on your mother for being particular on your behalf. I’m not up to marrying somebody I can’t support properly, myself,  and I’m years away from thinking about that. But dancing costs nothing and is good for the wind, as my old Gran used to say, and she should know - she did the hornpipe the day she died, and went out in her sleep easy as you please.” There. Nobody could say he was flirting under false pretenses now and even a starry-eyed infant like Doris should be able to curb her more dramatic inclinations.

In the end, he and Aziraphale both danced at least once with all of the unattached young women, and some of the married ones, and multiple times with those too overshadowed by Mickey and the American bridesmaids to get on the floor as often as they wished. Despite Lord Auldmon setting a good example, Sandy, Commander Hostmassif, and many of the older gentlemen washed their hands of their ballroom duties to drink and play billiards. This left the younger men with their hands full ensuring that no woman or just-out girl had to watch wistfully from the sidelines for two dances in a row. Mickey had plenty of takers (and, to her credit, made a point of singling out Ligur for attention when many of the Americans snubbed him in spite of the shortage - Crowley took note of which ones and left them to languish in favor of less picky unfortunates), but poor Jane Fell was embarrassingly grateful for the attentions even of her husband’s least favorite cousin and his oddly-moving ginger friend. She was too self-conscious to dance other than badly, at first, but the dancing master employed by Wellborn Hall and its sister academy had prepared them for that situation, and they soon had even her giggling rather than nearly weeping at each mishap. 

So they were pleasantly conscious of having spent their time well when they made their way to the top of the house in the small hours of the morning, comfortably full of excellent refreshments, and not nearly so tired that they didn’t take full advantage of the opportunity to peel each other out of their fancy clothes, one piece at a time.

They had never yet been in conditions of such privacy that they could feel secure trying everything they wanted to try, but by now they were well past the most fumbling experimental stages and fell asleep entirely happy and satisfied, Aziraphale round and solid wrapped up in Crowley’s arms and legs. Crowley dreamed warm golden dreams of a dance that was more than half lovemaking, in and out of rooms in a building that was part Wellborn Hall, part Prince Foundation, part Auldmon Abbey, and part church, surrounded by crowds who smiled at them while whirling by in their own dances, Joshua putting the cob through intricate figures, an angel dancing with a snake, his Gran throwing open a door and pointing them through it into a cloudscape where the dance went horizontal and they were alone in brilliant sunshine doing things they’d never dared to do, and doing them quite well, but the light was too bright and a clock chimed softly and Crowley woke up with empty arms. 

Aziraphale had pulled away from him at some point, though their feet were still tangled. The fluffy head beside him, face buried in the pillow, shone halolike in the ray of sun coming in through a chink in the curtains. Crowley, pondering the nicest available ways to wake him up, cast a glance at the clock. Plenty of time before even the children thought to bother them, and the doors were locked. So he snuggled up to kiss the back of his neck and snake an arm around his hips.

Aziraphale inhaled a shaky breath.

“Angel?” Crowley snapped awake, half sat up, pulled him so that he rolled over, revealing wet lashes and lips trying not to wobble.

“Goo, good morning,” Aziraphale gasped. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“What’s the matter?” Crowley kissed him between his eyebrows and wiped a thumb below his eyes. “Did you have a bad dream?” He did, sometimes; he dreamed far more than Crowley did, when he could get to sleep at all, and they always affected him for several minutes after waking as he tried to disentangle dream-life from reality. 

“Oh, no, my dear. It was a, was a very good dream. Truly.” Aziraphale smiled a tiny pressed-out smile and blinked several times. “I’m being silly.”

“No, you’re not. Tell me.”

“We got married. In the church. Everyone smiled at us. The vicar said, You may kiss the grooms. You wore a black morning suit and I wore white lace and we were so happy.”

“You’d look smashing in white lace.”

“Grimsby brought us an enormous cake that was also a bed and we made love in it.”

“What, right there in the church?”

“No, no, in the dining room. Grimsby closed the doors. Everybody else was dancing in the assembly hall at Wellborn. The sun was shining and the birds were singing and you rolled me over but you couldn’t find the Vaseline.”

“Oh, no!” Crowley pulled a face of comic dismay, was rewarded by a sniffly laugh.

“But then I found it tucked under a crystalized violet and we started over, only I woke up.” Aziraphale drew in a long breath. “And then I remembered.”

“Remembered?”

“That - that it’s never going to happen. That everything - that it’s ending.” He laid one plump soft hand on Crowley’s cheek. “I know it was silly, that, that it’s more important than ever to make the most of these weeks, but it all just, came over me and I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry. I’m better now.” But he still blinked too much, and Crowley was still bewildered.

“What are you talking about? Nothing’s ending. Everything’s beginning now. The rest of our lives.”

“Oh, Crowley!” Aziraphale shook his head, eyes brimming over again. 

“Angel! Shh, don’t cry! You’re not making any sense. Tell me. What’s wrong? Don’t you know by now, if anything’s wrong, you only have to tell me and I’ll fix it?”

“You can’t fix this! No, not even you, my darling clever hero, you can’t stop time. You can’t - I’m going to Oxford. And you’re going to London.”

“Weekends exist, Angel. Trains run between London and Oxford.” Crowley kissed him, firmly. Sometimes, when Aziraphale got lost in his head, he needed some firm kissing to guide him out. “I’ll miss you every day of the week, but on Friday night I’ll get on that train and -“

“And what? What do we do once you arrive?”

“Anything we want! We’ll be grown men! You’ll have your own room!”

“Yes, we we’ll be grown men! This - what we do - this is something boys do, not men!”

Crowley snorted. “Rubbish. Men do this.”

“No, they don’t!”

“Yes they do! I told you about my Gran’s place, didn’t I? The rooms she rented out by the hour? To men and men as well as men and women. There were even a couple of - ” of the whores - “of people that came regularly that seemed to be both, or neither, or - people come in all sorts.”

“Those were -“ Aziraphale stopped, running up against the edge of Things Not Said, against the fact that Oxford was Oxford and the Edinburgh docks were the Edinburgh docks. “All right. Say there’s, there’s men who, that this is something that happens.”

“I promise you, it is,” said Crowley, smoothing down the little pinpricks Things Not Said always put into his heart. “Men of letters, even. You’ve heard of Oscar Wilde.”

“If it happens at all, it happens in London. You’ll be living in London. Meeting - meeting all those sorts. Men who are - clever and witty and handsome and and who - do things, who go out to the, the theater and dancing and, and playing cricket and, I don’t know, whatever people who aren’t me, who don’t stay home all the time reading -“

“Have I ever complained about you reading? You’re the most adorable bookworm in the world.”

“But I’m still a bookworm and you - aren’t. You get restless and go do things and that’s fine, you should go do them, but I can’t keep up with you and in London you’ll meet people who can. You will meet people who actually, who can, who are - who are like you, who are also stylish and restless and devil-may-care, and you’ll be friends with them, and at first, all right, at first you’ll take the train to Oxford and maybe we’ll be able to have you in my chamber or meet at - someplace, I don’t know where people meet in Oxford, I suppose there’s inns and hotels and so on, but you’ll have new friends and they’ll invite you to go places on weekends -“

“And I’ll tell them no, I have a prior engagement -“

“And you’ll be reading law and I’ll be reading medieval studies and we won’t - there’ll be no more helping each other, we’ll talk about what we do during the week and it will be all different things and and we’ll understand each other less and less and someday you’ll accept an invitation and skip one weekend and then another until you stop coming altogether because Oxford is boring and we’ll drift apart -“

“No I won’t!”

“Yes you will! It’s what happens, when people who were friends in school go to different Universities and there’s nothing else holding them together! Pater hasn’t seen anybody he went to school with in decades! Bolt couldn’t find enough old school friends to be ushers. That’s the only reason I was one, he certainly didn’t want me!”

“Gabe was in America for four years and he’s a prat. I’ll be in London and I’m - this - we’re - there is a lot more than nothing holding us together! What the deuce is going on in your head that you don’t trust me?”

“Of course I trust you! You’re my best friend! But best friends don’t - it’s not - “ Aziraphale stopped and took a deep breath, on the verge of tears again. “There’s no morning suits and white lace for us! The vicar will never smile at us over a prayerbook and tell us to kiss each other.”

Ah. “We don’t need a vicar. Look - if you’re so worried - all right, I’m stuck. I have to read law at the University of London because that’s what the Foundation’ll pay for. Go to your father and tell him you want to go to London instead of Oxford. It’s not too late.”

“I tried that! He - I - “

When you drift apart, the way friends do - Crowley heard Lord Auldmon’s voice, from that puzzling conversation on that long-ago day. “Your father’s the one put all this nonsense about drifting apart into your head, isn’t he?”

“I - no? I knew, before, only - Crowley. We have obligations. He reminded me of them, but I always knew I had them. You have to go to the University of London. I have to go to Oxford -“

“Why?”

“Because we always go to Oxford!”

“Gabe didn’t.”

“Bolt had an obligation to his mother’s family and besides, there’s lots more heiresses in America. If I don’t go to Oxford I have to go into the Army, which nobody thinks is a good idea. That’s the way it is! And I - when I -“ His voice dropped to a barely audible whisper, as if he couldn’t bear to hear himself speak. “Crowley.  I have to, to get married.”

“No, you don’t!”

“Yes, I do! It’s my duty to my family!”

“How? You’re the second spare, for pity’s sake, you don’t have to worry about heirs and things.”

“Pater was the third spare!”

“What?”

Aziraphale counted on his fingers. “Gabriel - diptheria. Raphael - shooting accident. Azrael James - killed his mother by being born, drowned at thirteen.  Pater very nearly died of measles, blood poisoning, and enemy action. Even Uncle Matt once fell downstairs and broke several bones. Uncle Raphael was grown up but hadn’t inherited yet when he died and then Pater had to leave the Army, scramble to find a wife, and start producing heirs. As many as he could. And that wasn’t a fluke. Grandfather was the youngest of six. His father was the second son of a third son and inherited due to the entail. We’re fantastically lucky we haven’t lost anybody from this generation yet - well, apart from Sandy's older brothers; in the main line, I mean - and nobody really believes it will hold. What if a liner Bolt travels to or from America in sinks? What if Raffles catches something deadly from a patient?  Life is dangerous. Historically, as a family, we’re fairly good at producing sons but we’re absolute rubbish at keeping them alive. That’s why Sandy married poor Janey, when he’d obviously much rather be a bachelor. If the entail is forced onto a cadet branch again, there needs to be a viable cadet branch that actually knows and cares something about the Abbey and Auldmon village. And then there’s the money issue. This is not a cheap estate to run. I can be allowed to live in Oxford after I graduate, but I must marry a woman with sufficient income that I won’t need an allowance from the family if the properties Mum left for Lamb and me fail, and she must produce at least one male child, in case, I don’t know, an epidemic or a train accident wipes out the others. It’s my duty.”

Crowley stared at him, feeling rather as if a cliff had crumpled on top of him. “That’s - All right. All right. Say you have to get married. That doesn’t mean -“

“It does, though. It does!” Aziraphale’s voice was getting shrill and choked. “We don’t marry for love in this family. I think the women understand that. I think Elspeth knows that she just conducted a business transaction, her money for a minor title and an estate. Mickey certainly knows that she’s part of a complex transaction involving naval contracts for the factories and future Hostmassif naval personnel for her husband’s family, and she has planned her life accordingly. Raffles-and-Ruth are as good as it gets - Pater was against it at first, because she doesn’t bring in any new money, but at least what she does have stays in the family and she and Raffles - in love doesn’t describe it, but they are great friends and they want the same things. He’ll be a doctor and she’ll be his nurse and Uncle Matt will retire and they can have his practice. It’s very tidy and everybody knows what to expect. I don’t know if Janey understood the bargain she was making when she accepted Sandy, but - but - she very clearly regrets it and - “

“Of course she does! Sandy’s worsse than a prat!”

“Exactly! Crowley. I won’t - I can’t - If I were like that - Standing up in front of God and the parish and everybody and putting my hand in hers and swearing to love honor and cherish and then turning right around and and betraying that, even for you, and - You wouldn’t even want me, if I were like that!“

The room and the bed were summer-at-the-top-of-the-house warm, but Crowley felt cold, a little sick, and could hear Old Mr Prince saying: They will use you instinctively. “I ssee,” he said, drawing away, unwinding his arm from Aziraphale’s torso. “Ssso. The plan is, to have your fun with me for the resst of the ssummer and then, what? Kisss me good-by forever?”

“No, of course not, but -“

“Your weekendss’ll be all taken up meeting people’ss ssissterss and comparing prosspectss? I’ve got some Ssoho properties and a shot at a title, what am I bid?” He sat up, glaring down at the weeping angel-face with its wide wet eyes and its sweet mouth fallen open and the drop forming on the end of its ridiculous nose. “He warned me. Old Mr Princce. When you firsst invited me out here, he warned me, every time he’ss given me permisssion to acccept another one, he reminds me, They think they’re your friends but they’re not, they don’t know how, it’ll alwayss be a virtue in them and a privilege to you, they’ll break your heart if you let them -“ Edinburgh was tumbling out of his mouth now, and he didn’t care. “What about Grimsby? Does he get the push too? Or can you keep him on a little longer, sseeing as how he never kisssed you, only did ssentry duty for you to enjoy your bit of rough?”

“Crowley -“

“If that’sss how you want it I dinna sssee the point of waiting aboot! I can catch the nine-oh-five and be gone before anybody elsse is even up -“ He twisted, turned his back on the appalled, adorable face, his feet over the side of the bed, ready to stand.

“Crowley!”

He had forgotten how strong Aziraphale was.

It was easy to forget that - for everyone except Aziraphale. He was so careful and precise in all his movements, the grip of his hands even in the heat of passion a balance of softness and firmness calibrated perfectly to the occasion, any weight he lifted handled so gently that to anyone who hadn’t handled it nothing could look more natural than his ease with it. Only when, in privacy and happiness, he picked Crowley up by the hips and whirled around with him as if he were a small child; only when he stepped between a bully and a victim and smiled benignly; only when he laid a restraining hand on the shoulder of a boy about to do something resoundingly stupid, did even Crowley remember that a part of his mind (the part, perhaps, that other boys devoted to maths or cricket) lived in a constant state of planning and negotiating and judging how much force was suitable to any action, sufficient to accomplish the goal without doing damage to the world or anyone in it.

He remembered now, when Aziraphale lunged across the bed and seized him, hip and shoulder, slammed him down into the smothering softness of the featherbed, and held him there, nose to ridiculous sniffy nose. Crowley couldn’t move (well, one muscle could, leaping toward the angel, straining to reach him). All the breath went out of him, making an ugly ngk sound on its way.

“Crowley,” whispered Aziraphale, in a voice thin and delicate as the nearly-see-through china from which the wedding guests had drunk tea, “if you want to leave you can go but please, please, please, listen to me first. You know as well as I do, none of us get many choices. Once I set foot in Oxford, mine will be limited to which pastry to eat and how much milk to take in my tea. Even my area of specialization is already decided. I must go to Oxford. I must do the proper Oxford things and say the proper Oxford things and join the proper Oxford clubs and and meet the proper Oxford people. I must marry and the criteria for the woman I must marry are not mine to set.  I must have at least one son. I must do everything a certain way and make the best of it. From that point on - you will have more choices than me and I need to know that you’re making them. Do you understand? If I am to bear the life that is laid out for me, I will need to know that you have friends, good friends. Lo, lovers, even. If I am ever to sleep again I need to be able to close my eyes and imagine you laughing. Surrounded by people as beautiful and clever and interesting as you. Doing brilliant things. Being happy. Being - you were born to be dazzling. You must be free to dazzle. You mustn’t be, be trapped, hurting yourself to hang after me. People grow up. They grow apart. It’s normal, and we’ll do nothing but hurt ourselves and, and anyone around us who loves us, or could love us if we allowed them, if we don’t let it happen. I hoped I could put it off till the end of summer but if you have to start now I I I do understand. And if you have to hate me, then, yes, all right, that’s - you do that. Make Grimsby hate me, too, if it, if it frees you up. But I can’t bear for you to do that thinking - not knowing - this isn’t what I want at all.” He released his hold and collapsed onto the bed, reaching under the pillow for a handkerchief, and blowing his nose. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

Crowley felt warm again. He pulled Aziraphale, unresisting, against his chest, and lay there, breathing in tandem with him, until he could speak. “If you had choices. If you could do anything you want.” Aziraphale shook his head, but Crowley pressed his hand into the curls until it held still (the knowledge fizzed in his blood: when Angel yielded to him, he chose to yield). “Anything you can imagine. In all the world of time and space, regardless of what anybody else expects. No duties. No demands. What would you choose to do?”

“I would live with you,” whispered Aziraphale. “You’d go out and do marvelous things and come home to tell me about them. I’d stay home and read and translate my book. We’d go to the theater and concerts once in awhile. We’d dine out in all the best restaurants. We’d have - at home we’d hold scrumptious little dinners, for Grimsby and the Lamb and sometimes Raffles-and-Ruth. But mostly it would be you and me.”

“Then that’s what you’ll have.”

Aziraphale sighed a great shuddering sigh. “Stop it.”

“No.” Crowley kissed the top of his head. “Angel. I will get you what you want. Not right away. I don’t know how yet. But I will. Trust me.”

“I trust you to the ends of the earth but trust won’t turn impossibilities into possibilities.”

“We’re not dealing in impossibilities here. Only improbabilities. Give me time to work it out. I’ll make it happen.”

Aziraphale blew his nose again and pressed closer, their skins warm and damp against each other, their nightshirts soft and limp after three restless joyous nights together. “How much time?”

Crowley gave the question serious consideration. Years of reading law, exams, training at the Prince legal firm and he didn’t, really, know what to expect from that...and the heir provision thing, that’d be tricky, though it wouldn’t be if - no, don’t go down that side road. How long? Better err on the side of caution. “Don’t get engaged before you’re twenty-eight. You’ll be a better catch by then, anyway, an established lecturer and on your way to donship, if I can’t come through, but - I’ll come through. “

“But that doesn’t -“

“It’ll be fine. You’ll see. Promise me. No engagements till you’re twenty-eight. For right now, I’ll stay till the end of summer and we won’t think about things ending or duty or any damn thing but having a good time together. We’ll collect Grimsby for August Bank Holiday and take him and the Lamb and as many of the Grimsby family as want to go to the seaside and nobody’ll have a care in the world. Then after that we’ll get to work on happily ever after. All right?”

A long, warm breath wafted across Crowley’s collarbone. “No engagement till I’m twenty-eight. I promise.” Aziraphale raised his head and kissed him. He still looked far too sad. As if he believed that when he was twenty-eight, he would have already been alone for some years. Probably he did believe that. Well. Somebody needed to push that belief right out of his head. Crowley ran his hands up under the nightshirt as he kissed him back.

By the time the nursery next door started making waking-child noises, they were both cheerful and needing to clean up again.

Chapter Text

But as the Archangel Gabriel was passing by, the baker dropped a tray of loaves and began cursing in his usual manner. The Archangel was shocked to hear the Lord’s name taken in vain, and turned to the Angel Aziraphale, saying: “Are you not ashamed, that someone in your field of care should speak such blasphemy? You must smite him at once.” Aziraphale protested: “If we smote him, his neighbors would wonder that deeds are unrewarded while words are punished unduly, for however incontinent his speech, he is a virtuous man who gives his unsold wares to beggars at the end of the day, and his honeycakes are very good indeed.”

“Aziraphale,” sighed the Archangel, “there is no commandment about honeycakes.”

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

Sergeant Shadwell did not look at all discomfited by a question most people, in his circumstances, would have considered an accusation.  He uncrossed his arms and leaned forward. “First I’d call on his angel, that Raziel, and of course the Lord Jesus Christ, to help me exorcize him, in hope that would do the trick, and if it didn’t work then I’d have to bind him and throw him in the fire. It’s the only way, ye ken. I tend the furnace for the theater, reckon that’d do it. It’s my plan, if I ever have to take out a witch meself, to get ‘em blind drunk first so they don’t feel it. Burning’s a terrible way to die, sir.”

“So it is.” The Inspector sat back again, looking as disappointed as Frank felt. “At least the poor lad was spared that.”

“Aye. It’s a terrible thing to happen, and him with a braw young bride too, for all she’s half kike, but it may be for the best, though I’m powerful afraid there’s a witch got into a new bairn last night when the lad died without burning. But God’s ways are mysterious, and confusing, too.”

“Yes. Well.” Frank might be imagining the wistful air with which the Inspector set aside the prospect of a viable suspect and resumed his first trajectory. “To business. You were in charge in the courtyard last night, I believe, Sergeant.”

“Aye, minding the bonfire and the burning of the graven images of that auld witch Fawkes, and letting off the fireworks to keep the hags at bay, and all.”

“And a man, like you, alert for danger, would have noticed all the comings and goings.”

And so he had, or very nearly. He could name every attendee, with a comment on their character; knew who belonged in each building and whether they went back to the right one or to “that house of the Jezebel’s, more shame to them.” He remembered Miss Device stumbling and having to be guided out of the dance by his nephew, Newton Pulsifer, and interpreted this as a wicked wile on her part to tempt him to something or other - precisely what was not clear, as they remained in the courtyard until they helped him douse the bonfire around one in the morning. Alas, the forty-five minutes it took for the PC to walk past on a clear footpath, and return to find a motorbike in the way, was the period during which his responsibilities for the incendiary rites of the night were most absorbing, and his failure to observe anything about the bookshop at that time was as natural as it was disappointing. Between one and two he had been busy going around with Pulsifer securing the theater and preparing for bed - which preparations included a “wee dram” that he claimed to be the only alcohol he had consumed all evening. Once in bed, he had slept - “I’m a champion sleeper when the imps the witches send after me are properly shut out” - and woken at his usual hour of six, to eat his breakfast of tea and toast, tend the furnace, and make his leisurely way to the courtyard where they had found him.

All these details took him three cigarettes to convey, each one rolled as he spoke and lit from the final ember of the previous one before he flicked it expertly across the room to shatter in the ashtray.  When finished, he shut his mouth tight and refused to say more, so they sent him away to send in the final witness of the night, his nephew Newton Pulsifer, of whom their hopes were thin and scant, but whom they might as well question while he was at hand.

Pulsifer had clearly been listening in the hall with Crowley, for he stepped into the doorway as Shadwell stepped out of it. He was a gangly young man, with curly hair, square glasses, and a quizzical expression apparently etched permanently onto his features. He gave his address as a flat in another Fell-owned building, adjacent to the theater, where he was employed as an assistant to the stage manager. He had been at the bonfire primarily as a celebrant, but partly to keep an eye on his uncle.

“Ah, yes,” said Lamb. “Your uncle. You overheard parts of his testimony, I believe?”

“I overheard all of it,” said Pulsifer. “So did Crowley, but he wouldn’t let me interrupt when I wanted to.”

“So you are aware that he considers the deceased to have been a witch, whom it was his duty to kill.”

“Yes. But he didn’t. If Uncle Shadwell ever killed someone he thought was a witch, the last thing he’d do would be to throw them in the river.”

“Weren’t you afraid, when you first heard that Joshua was dead, that your uncle had a part in it?”

“No. He talks about killing witches all the time, but he’s good at finding reasons not to burn them up alive. He doesn’t really want to do it, you see.”

“Why has your family not placed him in an institution?”

“Go boil your head?” Pulsifer looked both embarrassed and determined. (“Good lad!” Crowley said from the hall.) “Er - sorry. Just following my solicitor’s advice, there. Uncle Shadwell had nothing to do with the murder. He as good as told you so.”

“And we always believe everyone who tells us they didn’t murder people.”

“No, I mean - everything he told you adds up to not guilty. The murder method is wrong, the disposition of the body is wrong, and he’s got half the neighborhood for an alibi.”

“Not after two in the morning. The medicos can’t give us a firm time of death. Miss Device’s ‘feeling’ is not evidence.”

“He was asleep!”

“So he says.”

“So anybody says! He doesn’t drink, except for the wee dram at night, and it puts him out like a light. I saw him drink it and go to bed, and I put the light out for him and shut him in. He was safe as houses. I know he says horrible things, but he never does anything horrible. Ask anybody around here.”

“Oh, we will,” said Lamb. “Were you acquainted with the deceased?”

“Not well. I met him back when Uncle Shadwell first moved into the theater, but there was no reason for me to know Joshua particularly till I, till I started walking out with Anathema this year.” Pulsifer turned slightly pink at the admission, which made him look much younger. “He seemed nice. He was a good sport about Uncle Shadwell. It was still awkward to be around him, though. When he and Magdala came to England last month Mr Fell gave a dinner at a posh restaurant and I went with Anathema, to celebrate the wedding and introduce Magdala to Anathema and the director. But I was mostly there for Anathema.”

“When did you last see the deceased?”

“Saturday, I think. I saw Joshua in the courtyard when I took out the rubbish and we waved at each other, but we didn’t speak.”

“Did you notice anyone or anything unusual about the place on Monday night? Unusual activity around the bookshop? Someone surprising at the party? Anyone absent who should have been present? Anything at all?”

“I thought I saw a light in the back of the bookshop during the fireworks, but I wasn’t sure and then I had to help Uncle Shadwell with the big skyrocket. I didn’t say anything to him about it, because I didn’t want to interrupt the fun, but I did go and check after the skyrocket went. There’d be no end of an upset, if Mr Fell got burgled. A car was driving away, and Joshua’s motorbike was in the footpath, but the door was locked and the blinds were down. I tried to move the motorbike out of the way, but I couldn’t, not by myself.”

“You saw all that? About when?”

“I think the big skyrocket went up around ten, so a few minutes after that.”

“Was anyone else passing on the street at that time?”

“I don’t remember anybody. Most people were either at bonfires or sticking their heads under their pillows cursing the fireworks by that time.”

“What about the car?”

Pulsifer shrugged. “Big. Closed. I think it was pulling away from the kerb rather than driving by but that’s just an impression. It was some dark color, but I couldn’t swear between blue or green or black, it passed under the streetlamp so fast. Hood ornament. I think it was a B, like Mr Crowley’s car.”

“Like Mr Crowley’s car?”

“Yes.”

“But not his? Could you swear to that?”

“It couldn’t have been his. He takes Mr Fell out of town for Bonfire Night.”

“That’s not what I asked. If you had seen that car on any other night than Bonfire Night, would you be ready to swear it wasn’t his?”

“Um - probably not? I probably would have assumed it was, if it had been stopped there, because people don’t drive to the bookshop, except for Mr Crowley. They park nearby and they walk. But it was on Bonfire Night so I knew it wasn’t. But I didn’t notice the plate number or anything. I was more worried about somebody being in the shop, and when I saw the motorbike, I of course thought Josh was there so I tried the door and knocked, but there was no light and no one answered. So I thought I must have imagined the light. Now I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“Because of what they’ve been saying in the other room, about Mr Fell having a gun in the back and somebody getting it out of the box he’d locked it in. What I thought I saw was a light moving, like an electric torch, on the inside of the blind; but then when the door was locked and everything was dark I thought it must have been reflection of the bonfire or fireworks after all, and now I think it might have been the person taking the gun, but - you make things up, don’t you? When you try to remember what you really saw, compared to what you found out later.”

“That’s very true, Mr Pulsifer, and it’s astute of you to recognize that tendency in yourself. It’s a great hindrance to us, sometimes, when people remember things that aren’t so. Were you aware last night that Mr Fell owned a gun, by the way?”

Pulsifer shook his head. “I knew he was in the War, but - I never thought about it. Why should I? Everybody knows if you try to burgle him he gives you tea and cake.”

“This is very important information, Mr Pulsifer, and it seems probable that you will be called on to speak at the inquest.”

“I will?” He looked taken aback. “All right. Oh! Do you think - could Josh have gone in and caught someone burgling the place and they shot him and took him off in the car? No - there’d be blood all over the shop, and burglars don’t drive to their jobs in fancy cars.”

“If nothing else, there’s a reasonable chance that, if we can find the car that passed at that time, the passengers might have seen how the motorbike got left in such an inconvenient place, or caught a glimpse of someone entering or leaving the bookshop, which information could go a long way toward building a picture of what happened. So hold yourself ready to testify if called.”

“I will, sir. Do you know when the inquest will be?”

“Not precisely, but soon. Before the end of the week, certainly. You have, I hope, no plans to go out of town? Very well, I think we’re done here. Go tell Mrs Fell and Miss Device that we’re getting out of their hair and - has Mr Fell floated a plan for your uncle to guard them tonight, against the possibility that anti-Semitism is the motive?”

“Yes, he has,” said Pulsifer, rising.

“Possibly it would be better to put yourself forward for the job. You uncle seems to believe that Miss Device is a witch, too.”

“Oh, she is,” said Pulsifer. “It’s all right, really. Don’t worry about that.”

Pulsifer took the witness chair with him when he went out, and closed the door. Frank shut his notebook and put it away before bringing the typewriter down from the bookcase. Inspector Lamb tapped his pipe out in the ashtray. “At least Pulsifer will make a decent witness. I was dreading having to put Shadwell on. Pity Shadwell’s right out. Not fit to stand trial and off to Broadmoor with him, much less work for us.”

“I suppose he is right out, sir?“

“I know, it’s tempting, but Pulsifer’s right. If he’s mad he’s got a motive, but the method’s all wrong. If he’s not mad, he’s got no motive. Either way, his alibi’s fair. Really don’t like him as a guard for Mrs Joshua, though. I’ll have to see if we can spare a man to keep an eye on her. But for now, let’s see if that bakeshop will give us some tea.”

When they carried the second spindly chair back out to the front room, however, Mrs Potts gave them each another cup and a plate with an excellent jam bun on it, and there seemed to be nothing to do but eat them, though they did so standing. Pulsifer and Shadwell were in the process of departing, Aziraphale was rolling down his sleeves after, apparently, doing the washing up; Miss Device produced the negative of a picture from the wedding that would produce, in the police photography lab, a much more useful photo for canvassers than the one presently in use, and Crowley lounged against the cupboards in the tiny kitchen diligently drying things and putting them away. Mrs Potts reported that Magdala was sleeping, poor thing. 

Aziraphale approached them with a scrunched, anxious version of his smile, fastening his cuff links. “Crowley has kindly granted me the use of his guest room so that I, I needn’t be alone with my thoughts tonight, so if you need me for anything that’s where I’ll be found. In the meantime, would there be any objection to our taking the motorbike to the garage for Magdala? Or will it need to be taken as evidence?”

“The fingerprint boys couldn’t get a single clear print off it, so it’s all yours,” said the Inspector. “By the way, any of Joshua’s associates, aside from Crowley, drive a dark-colored closed car, possibly a Bentley?”

“Oh, because of the car Newton saw? Yes, we were discussing that a bit ago.”

Of course they were, thought Frank, but you can’t keep witnesses from sharing, however hard you try.

“It’d be a bit upmarket for most of the folks he went about with,” drawled Crowley, putting a plate into a cupboard. “Gabe used to have a blue Bentley four and a half liter that he liked to brag about, but I don’t know if he still does. No idea what Sandy or Mickey use.”

“I think they sold off all the cars except Gabriel’s Bentley and Uncle Matt’s touring car when Lesley retired and they didn’t hire a new driver,” said Aziraphale. “Pater was too sick to get about anymore after the episode the Crash brought on, and it’s more economical for Sandy to share Uncle Matt’s and take trains than to get one for his own use. It’s not as if Uncle Matt ever leaves the Abbey anymore. I know Mickey got a new car fairly recently - a pale cream one, with white upholstery - after complaining for years about her husband’s insistence on black as the only respectable color for an automobile. I’ve no idea if they kept the old one, or what make it was, or anything. Surely any of them who’d driven by the shop would have mentioned it, though.”

“Well, we’ll look into it,” said the Inspector, finishing up his jam bun. “Odds are it was only a random passerby. I’ve got to write up pleas for the press - anyone passing by this block between nine-thirty and ten, anyone who saw your brother at any point between Auldmon Abbey and Westminster Bridge - and hope there’ll be gold among the dross. Whoever did this, and whyever he did, we will find him, Mr Fell.”

Fell looked, if anything, sadder. “Of course I hope you do, but - I’d rather have my Lamb back.”

Crowley came up behind him, hand hovering near his friend’s shoulder. “C’mon, Angel. You look all in. We’ll take the motorbike to the garage and tuck you up in my guest room with a book and a tot of brandy while I come back for the car. All right?”

Fell sighed. “All right, dear boy.”

When the door closed behind them, the Inspector turned to the ladies. “I feel I must caution you, Miss Device,” he said. “Although the notion of Mrs Fell having special protection is not a bad one, and at the moment no reason exists to suspect Sergeant Shadwell of the murder of Joshua Fell, the fact that he feels it his duty to burn witches and believes you to be a witch make him a very poor candidate for providing that protection. Nor is it clear where he stands on the Jewish question. I must strongly advise against it.”

“Duly noted,” said Miss Device. “For the record, I am a witch. All the women in my family are. I wrote the play about one of my ancestors. It used to bother me when the Sergeant ranted about us, but - it’s only ranting. Only talk. He’d never hurt anyone, anymore.”

“Anymore?” Frank repeated.

“People talk about having bad wars,” said Mrs Potts. “Well, Sergeant Shadwell had two. Three, in a manner of speaking. He was in the Boer War, and then a dozen years in different parts of the Empire keeping natives in line, and then the Great War. Dress it up as pretty as you like, if you’re in a war, you hurt people, and it was all very bad for him. He has nightmares sometimes, where he has to hurt people. But when you’ve spent your whole life, threatening - he doesn’t know how else to act, that’s all. It’s rude, but it can be useful, when someone needs to be run off, that’s making unreasonable demands of the girls, or the children need to keep away from the fireworks so they don’t blow themselves up.” She giggled. “Oh, he can be downright terrifying, the poor dear man!”

“But he really is entirely harmless. I’m not so fond of being called a hussy of the devil that I’d stay around him if he weren’t,” said Miss Device. “And if there’s a homicidal anti-semite running around, I’d rather have the Sergeant between him and my friends than many a person who never called anybody an ugly name.”

And there they had to leave it, thanking them for the tea and urging them to call the number on the card they left should a situation arise or they come across any new information. “What an odd-job lot of people!” Frank observed, on their way down the stairs.

“There’s no telling who a murder investigation will lead you among, and that’s a fact,” said Inspector Lamb. “On the whole they’re a pleasant bunch, at least. Often as not you find yourself in a nest of vipers, all lying in their teeth and trying to throw suspicion on each other. These might still be lying, and so might any of the Fells, but on the whole, given where we started, we’ve had a productive time, and it’s not every witness who’ll feed a copper jam buns or bring him tea, either.”

“I’m not sure we’ve talked to a viable suspect yet,” said Frank. “Aziraphale’s the only one with a shadow of a motive. Everyone’s so insistent that it couldn’t have been him, I almost want him to be guilty, but after seeing his face when he heard the news - well, he’d be better off acting in his own theater than selling books, if that was a performance.”

“Don’t you go using detective story logic, or you’ll be sniffing after clever clues and miss what’s in front of your face. Murderers aren’t, by and large, a clever bunch. You look in the right place and you’ll find ‘em. No, something happened on the way down from Lancashire and it’ll be a hard slog to find out what, but somebody knows something and we’ll find him. I’ll try to get a reward for information authorized. That’ll net us something, you mark my words.”

“What about the keys, though?” Frank unlocked the car. “If the gun’s associated with the murder, and there was no forced entry, it must have been taken by someone with a key.”

“It could have been taken any time since September. And keys can be borrowed and copied and returned without their owners any the wiser; especially ones handled as carelessly as that set Sandalphon was supposed to have that wound up in Mrs Hostmassif’s front hall. No, we can’t put too much weight on the keys at this point.”

To Frank’s surprise, as he drove the car out of the courtyard, between the bookshop and the printshop, he was waved down by a distressed Aziraphale. Crowley had the motorbike on its side,  examining it under the streetlamp with a scowl on his face. Frank braked and put down the window, letting in a sharp fuel smell. “What’s the matter, sir?”

“It’s out of petrol,” was the reply, “and there’s none on the pavement.”

“I’m sorry?”

Crowley beckoned impatiently from the island of light.

“It was empty when it got here,” said Aziraphale. “It can’t have gotten here on its own.”

Frank set the brake as the Inspector climbed out and strode over.  “It was dry as a bone,” said Crowley. “Wouldn’t catch. So I got my spare can of petrol. See that puddle, that’s where what I put in dripped right out again. And look here - there’s a huge puncture in the tank. But the pavement -“

“Oh,” said Frank, surveying the portion of the footpath where the motorbike had originally been found. It was about as salubrious as city pavement ever is, but bore no evidence of having been dripped on steadily overnight. “He’s right, Inspector. The tank must have been empty when it arrived, which makes it hardly likely to have been driven here.”

“The devil it was! How’d it get here, then?” The Inspector frowned. “I wonder if that car Pulsifer saw had a towing hitch? And I wonder what the fingerprint boys were doing, missing a puncture like that? Looks like it was put in with a nail.”

“I doubt they were looking too hard for prints on the tank, and the exhaust pipe makes it hard to see,” said Crowley. “So does this mean it needs to go in evidence, after all?”

“It does, more’s the pity,” sighed Lamb. “And us without a towing hitch!”

Aziraphale looked from the motorbike, to the police car, and back, with an air of concentration. “I hardly think you need one. If we turn the front wheel as far as it will go, and wedge it in sideways, and put down one window for a bit of one tyre to stick out, it should fit into the back seat of your car all right.”

Crowley winced. “It’ll get muck all over their upholstery!”

“Not with a rug down. Do you keep one in the boot, Inspector?”

“A rug in the boot? Whatever for?”

“To protect your upholstery when you have to haul things. Or for when you get mired in an unpaved lane and need to put something between the tyre and the mud to provide traction. Crowley -“

“Oh, very nice, volunteer my rugs in the public service,” said Crowley, pulling his keys out of his pocket and sauntering over to unlock the boot of his car and pull a large, surprisingly clean, bit of old carpet out from under suitcases. “Here, this should be big enough.”

Frank put down both the rear windows of the police car and covered the interior with the rug, with Crowley’s assistance, then turned to the logistical problem of getting the bike up into it; but to his surprise, Aziraphale, who had been dusting it down with a rag (also from Crowley’s boot), squatted down, wrapped his arms around it, one under the handlebars and one under the rear edge of the seat, and picked it up. He sidled toward the car, where Crowley turned the tyre and assisted him to maneuver it through the door and fit it across the seat, then close the door upon it with a bit of the rear tyre sticking out, the handlebars tilted down toward the seat, and the front tyre wedged behind the front passenger seat. He turned away, fussily dusting his waistcoat and coat sleeves. “Oh, dear -“

“Never mind, Angel, I promise, Erich’ll get them good as new,” said Crowley. “Close your mouth, Detective Boy. You’re catching flies.”

Frank shut his mouth. “Abbot,” said the Inspector, with some asperity. “You address him as Sergeant Abbot and mind you show respect for the law. I hadn’t realized you were a weightlifter, Mr Fell.”

“What? Oh, no, I’m not really.” Aziraphale smiled a tiny apologetic smile. “I’m just, I’ve always been stronger than I look. Which was a bit dangerous, when I was small. It’s something that, well, crops up now and again, in the family. My Great-Uncle Metatron Elijah, who was a youngest son, disgraced the family early in the last century, by running away to join a traveling freak show. It was the biggest scandal the family’s ever known. Till, till now.” He blinked, and the apologetic smile trembled in its foundations.

“Let’s go, Angel,” said Crowley.” S’been a long day. Good evening, gentlemen, and good hunting to you.” He opened the passenger door and ushered his friend into it before getting into the driver’s seat and pulling away from the kerb, accelerating much too quickly. 

Frank and the Inspector looked after them. “What do you make of that?” Frank asked.

“I don’t make anything of anything,” said Inspector Lamb. “Let’s get this thing back to the Yard.”

Chapter Text

Then Satan called the Serpent before him, and bade him speak of all the evil he had done in his span upon the earth, with the Archangel hiding behind the arras, as they both thought, unobserved. But the Serpent smelled lavender amid the brimstone, and saw the tip of one wing peeking out. Therefore, he said: “Alas, though I have tempted humankind to sin where ever and how ever I could, and though indeed the crimes I have inspired are many, yet there is one who forever blocks my path, forestalls my hand, and turns the faces of men against me with the power of his love, the sweetness of his voice, and the kindness of his heart. He is too clever for my wiles and too mighty to challenge in a fight; moreover, if I hurt so much as a hair upon his head, mankind becomes angry with me and will not hear my temptations. Induce Heaven to recall the Angel Aziraphale, and I will make Hell upon the Earth, but so long as he remains there, I am thwarted.”

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

Aziraphale and Crowley parted at the station the day before Aziraphale had to go down to Oxford, as Crowley needed to visit the Foundation to collect his new wardrobe and instructions before he went on to London and University. They said their real good-byes early in the morning, careful and quiet (and of course it wasn’t really good-bye at all, though Crowley could tell Aziraphale still expected to lose him over the course of the next few terms.) At the little station in the copse outside the village they only shook hands on the platform, though Joshua overcame the dignity of his age sufficiently to hug him around the neck, as he’d always used to say good-bye to everybody when they went off to school without him. Crowley leaned theatrically out of the window waving his handkerchief and blowing kisses as the train pulled out, to make them laugh, and only settled back in his seat and allowed himself to feel the ache of parting when they vanished around the bend. The cook had provided him with a generous hamper (though it undoubtedly paled beside the hampers she would prepare for Angel and the Lamb), which he shared out with the family who joined him in the compartment at the next stop, feeling comfortably bountiful at seeing meat pies, apples, and ginger beer disappear down the throats of growing children he would never see again. The mother, who looked a bit pale and had enough to do with the baby, fell asleep in a corner of the compartment while her children played twenty questions and learned to make handkerchief rats with him, and when he disembarked to change trains they all waved to him out of the windows. It was a great day for waving.

Always before when he visited the Prince Foundation he had been with other boys. Alone, he was not worth sending the car for, so he engaged a cab at his final station, and arrived at the familiar looming building soon enough. As per his instructions in impersonating a gentleman, he tipped the cabby the price of a drink, and sauntered up the marble stairs with what he hoped looked like carefree aplomb.

The truth was, the place always depressed his spirits. It was big, full of bedrooms and classrooms and offices. It sat in the middle of a sizable property, with strategically placed walls and trees obscuring the neighbors and muffling the sounds of traffic, so that it might have been a grand estate far out in the country rather than a short journey from London. He knew that the boys inside would be wrapping up whatever they were being drilled in, inside and out, in order to wash their faces and be ready to report to tea, which was another sort of drill, when the stable clock and the big case clock in the entrance hall sounded the half-hour, but he could neither see nor hear them as he rang the bell, all evidence of boyish existence (save the ambient odor of Growing Youth) hidden away by plush curtains, thick shrubberies, and interior doors covered in green baize. He greeted the failed Prince Boy training for service who answered the bell by name and was greeted, in turn, with a respect so careful it verged on mockery, and told to report to Miss Dagon.

She was, as she always was, in her office, with the outer door to the hall open, and the inner one leading to the mysterious recesses of the Files and the sacred precincts of the  Princes’ offices securely shut. The light here was always slightly dim and greenish, and regardless of the weather he had just come from, Crowley always felt that outside her lace-shrouded windows it must be raining. Miss Dagon herself was a hearty woman whose ginger hair, done in the very latest style compatible with her age and responsibilities, was just beginning to go gray, and whose attire always had something about it suggestive of the ocean deeps. Today her skirt was the dark blue of the abyss and her shirtwaist some kind of silvery fabric whose many tiny pleats reminded him of scales, and she wore an astonishing pair of earrings, like the skeletons of tiny fish. She smiled, showing too many teeth, and her complexion had a waxy, damp appearance, which was all as usual. Crowley sauntered in and bowed in the way that pleased her. “How do you do, Miss Dagon? You’re looking very well.”

“As do you, Mr Crowley,” she answered, rising and giving him her hand so he could prove he knew what to do with it. “How was your county wedding?”

“Overrun with Americans. I danced with all of them once and did my duty by all the wallflowers diligently. The groom outed me as a charity boy, so one of the youngest Americans was all set to make me into her Tragic Romance; but it didn’t seem very gentlemanly to encourage her.”

She showed him her teeth again. “So? How does it feel to be a man?”

“Am I a man?”

“You’re no longer a schoolboy.”

“Good. Then you’ll come dine with me sometime this term, and make all the other lads jealous.” 

She laughed at that. “You and your cheek!”

“I’m perfectly serious. You must know that every Prince Boy is desperately in love with their Miss Dagon.”  This was almost a true statement. She was the only woman most of them ever saw to speak to, and though the drills she conducted were some of the strictest they endured, when not drilling them she was easily the jolliest adult they encountered here; besides which, as mistress of The Files, she was the one who remembered their birthdays, guarded their health, noticed their difficulties, evaluated their progress, administered discipline, and provided their needs. For most of them, the authority of Mr B. Prince and Old Mr Prince, though absolute, was distant and impersonal, but Miss Dagon was the face of the Foundation. “Why should I be any different?”

“Because you are, in token of which, you’re having tea tete-a-tete with Mr L.”

“I am?” Nobody ever had tea alone with Old Mr Prince! Except, sometimes, presumably, Mr B and possibly Miss Dagon herself.

“You are, so run along and wash your face and change your collar. Same old room, and then back here.”

He obeyed, finding his things already laid out on the dressing table by the efficient footman. He waved at Archie Miller and the others still at Wellborn or competing to be chosen to go there (had he ever looked as small, young, and lost as those dozen eleven-year-olds undergoing the first, brutal winnowing?) as they all trooped downstairs toward the drawing room, but didn’t stop to talk, and arrived in the door of the office as the case clock struck 4:30. Miss Dagon gave him a brisk once-over , opened the door, led him to another door down a dark hallway, and announced: “Mr Crowley’s here for tea, sir.”

“Come in, come in,” said Old Mr Prince.

Old Mr Prince liked Crowley to swagger, so he swallowed down the lump of anxiety in his throat (if he were the first Prince Boy ever to disappoint so badly as to have his scholarship pulled out from under him, the Princes would do it in full view of all the others; private tea in the study, however it felt, had to be a good thing) and swaggered in with an extra roll in his hips. “Good afternoon, sir. How do you do?” Miss Dagon retreated and closed the door, off to “be mother” and pour the tea for the crowd in the drawing room.

“I do very well, as always,” said Old Mr Prince. “Come, sit.” He was a tall man, probably as old as Lord Auldmon but looking ten years younger, with a thick head of hair and an immaculate suit. His private drawing room was snug to the point of being oppressively warm, and had recently been redecorated in the very latest style, with stenciled wallpaper and a carpet that sank so deep beneath the feet that Crowley felt off-balance until he achieved the wingback chair on the opposite side of the tea table from his host.  “Tell me all about Auldmon Abbey,” Old Mr Prince said, pouring from the silver teapot with his own hands.

Crowley had reported everything of interest to the Foundation (he knew, by now, exactly what interested the Foundation) in his weekly letters, but he ran through it again, watching Old Mr Prince’s face in order to contract or expand his account according to the interest expressed there. Old Mr Prince’s default expression was one verging on a sneer, which all the boys imitated until they perfected their own, but the practiced eye could distinguish the amused sneer from the bored one, the intrigued from the impatient. “And Lord Auldmon?” The old man asked, helping Crowley to a third cress sandwich.

“He was at the factories more than he has been lately,” Crowley informed him, accepting the sandwich without enthusiasm. Prince Foundation food was plentiful, and better far than school food, but compared to that provided at Auldmon Abbey, it was relatively tasteless, intended to fuel young bodies and train the boys to graciously eat whatever was put in front of them in the proper amounts and with the proper manners, not to provide pleasure. Crowley was not certain Old Mr Prince understood that food had the potential for providing pleasure; was not certain he would know pleasure if he ever experienced it. “With his heir on a bridal tour of Europe he’s back to overseeing everything himself. He looks forward to having more time at home, and to being able to oversee the estate better, in the near future, and the new Mrs Fell has great plans for redecorating.”

“Ah. Going to get the west wing refurbished at last?” That was the amused sneer.

Crowley shrugged and mirrored his expression. “Or possibly tear it down and start over with it.”

“Ligur claims to have made a great hit with certain portions of the wedding party.”

Ah. Cross-checking reports. “He made a strong impression, in any case. The bride’s family are all racial snobs, though Mr Wingarde was willing to unbend on that front in order to discuss financial markets with him, for lack of anyone else in the trade around. Certain members of the groom’s family seemed to pay special attention to Ligur specifically to annoy the bride’s family. Since the groom despises me, I kept my distance from that lot and couldn’t tell how many of them were genuinely warming up to him, but he is good at warming ‘em, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find he’d made some lasting connections there. Gabe didn’t reveal him as a charity boy and he was better dressed than a lot of them, so he actually had fewer difficulties to overcome than he might have. Gabe himself was just glad to have the right number of ushers and didn’t notice any of that byplay that I could tell. I’m not sure he’s ever noticed a social nuance in his life, till it stopped being a nuance and blew up in his face.”

“I see. What about the groom’s sister? Michaela Fell?”

“Hostmassif. She’s married, for all the good it does her.” Crowley flicked through his memories of spotting them together - dancing, at dinner, walking on the grounds, sitting on the same couch in the drawing room. “She’s got one of those posh wooden faces that doesn’t move much except to look down the nose a bit harder, but by her standards, yeah, she did seem to like him. Not so much that she wasn’t also rubbing the bride’s nose in him, though.”

Old Mr Prince laughed his dry, hard laugh. “And this Angel of yours? Off to Oxford all right?”

“He leaves tomorrow,” said Crowley, as nonchalantly as possible. “I’m of two minds about calling him that going forward. School names do hang about, but with him only calling me Crowley, and going among strangers - well, not sure what it’ll imply.”

“You expect to maintain the connection, then?”

“I will if I can. He seems inclined to. It’s easy to forget, when you only see him among people he’s known a long time, but strangers make him nervous and he clings tight to those he knows.” Crowley weighed his loyalties, and added, with carefully measured carelessness: “He told me he’d asked his father to let him go to the University of London instead of Oxford.”

“Did he indeed?” Old Mr Prince set his head on one side. “No joy there, I take it.”

“No. They’re an Oxford family. Lord Auldmon’ll indulge his Sunshine in little things, but when it comes to the traditions and responsibilities, he takes a hard line.” They were approaching a question he’d been pondering for some time, and Crowley felt his way along step by step. “Better for me, that - if you consider Oxford connections worth making. I’ve promised to come up and visit him sometimes.”

“Oxford and Cambridge connections are very well worth making. That’s where the Old Boy Network really comes together.”

“That’s what I thought. But there must be a reason why Prince Boys go to the University of London, instead.” There. That was as close as he dared come to asking about the essential functions of the Foundation. Old Mr Prince would take up the thread, or he wouldn’t - and there was the pleased sneer.

“So there is.” Old Mr Prince laid aside his teacup and picked up a humidor. “How’s your smoking coming?”

“So-so. I can get through a pipe tolerably well these days, if I can keep the thing lit.”

“Cigars are perhaps asking too much, then.” He put down the humidor and picked up a cigarette case. “You should have been drilling that all summer, but you can make up lost time at college, since you got the basics down last year. Next time I see you, I will share a cigar with you. I think you’ll like this. Turkish tobacco, very smooth.”

Crowley accepted the cigarette, and the light, and that tea was over and a new phase begun. As cigarettes went, it wasn’t bad. He hadn’t gotten to the point of enjoying smoking, but if nothing else, it gave him something to do with his hands as he waited for Old Mr Prince to direct the conversation.

“The Old Boy Network begins in the public schools, and establishes itself at Cambridge and Oxford.” Old Mr Prince was in lecture mode, his terse gestures emphasized by the trails of cigarette smoke they left in their wake. “But it pays off in London. Up to this point, Mr Crowley, you have been the recipient of the Foundation’s favors and have done no more in return for those favors than to apply yourself to the task of molding and improving yourself to the standards demanded of you. Without the Foundation’s investment of money, time, and effort, you would not, now, be fit to appear in the drawing rooms and clubs where gentlemen assemble. No lady would condescend to speak to you. You would never have seen the inside of a grand estate. You would - if you had even survived this long - be doing menial labor well below your mental capacity, your talents undeveloped and unrecognized, your health impaired, your opportunities restricted. You would do well to remember this.”

“I think about it often,” said Crowley, mentally bracing himself to finally learn the size of the bill he’d been vaguely expecting to come due since his first meeting with Old Mr Prince, when he had realized that “kindness” and “generosity” had no part in his dealings with anyone. 

“Good.” Old Mr Prince took a drag of the cigarette, then tapped off the ash into a silver ashtray, matching the tea service, on the table between them. “When you arrive in London tomorrow, you will still be the beneficiary of the Foundation’s largesse - but you will be expected to begin to also be an asset. You will, as usual, be diligent in your studies and in making connections among your fellow students. You may follow your own inclination in where these connections lead you. Theaters, galleries, pubs, sporting events, restaurants - all have their uses and their opportunities. You will have a generous allowance that will allow you to cut a dash in your chosen leisure pursuits and you will be expected to cut that dash. To that end, you will patronize the tailor, the barber, and the haberdasher whose directions Miss Dagon will give you. You will continue your weekly letters, detailing your connections and pursuits and reporting any noteworthy gossip that reaches your ears. Time and use will improve your judgement about what gossip is and is not noteworthy and what connections are most valuable.”

Crowley nodded, trying to look like someone who could cut a dash as easily as he could cut a thread. The cigarette was making him lightheaded, and he tried not to use the ashtray too often, lest it look like restless fidgeting; but he would have given a lot to be able to fidget restlessly.

“You will also receive periodic tasks which you will be expected to accomplish promptly, competently, and discreetly. These tasks will vary and will take your normal habits and resources into consideration, so you will find that accuracy in reporting will benefit you. Your instructions may arrive by note, by telephone once you have access to one, but most often, by direct communication from some other functionary of the Foundation. You are not to discuss these instructions with anyone except the person who communicates them to you, and when reporting on your success or failure during your weekly letter. You are not to allow written instructions to be read by anyone else, under any circumstances. Burning is their preferred fate; if you cannot burn them, shredding the paper and disposing of the shreds in more than one waste-bin is acceptable. If your performance is satisfactory, you will receive tasks more often; if it is not, you will receive fewer tasks. You will receive no warning when the tasks you complete fall below acceptable standards, but will accept the consequences when the Foundation sees fit to levy them. Every quarter day, your overall performance will be reviewed and your allowance increased or decreased, depending directly on the quantity and quality of your completed assignments.” Old Mr Prince’s cold hard eyes watched his face closely through the veils of smoke. “Do you understand?”

“I believe so,” said Crowley, as a part of his mind screamed in fear of what might be demanded of him. “I will be happy to do anything in my power to further the Foundation’s interests, of course. May I ask what sort of tasks I will be instructed to perform?”

Old Mr Prince shrugged, gesturing airily with his cigarette, but there was nothing airy about the near-sneer. “At first, mostly delivering a message here or handing off a parcel there. Some people never do more than that during this phase of their education. You, however, I expect to advance to more complex tasks by next term. You may be required to travel short distances, to witness certain transactions, to provide introductions, or to obtain information. I have every reason to anticipate that you will, ultimately, be someone to whom we can present a problem, tell you to solve it, and depend upon it being solved, without further drain on our resources. Some tasks may be unorthodox, may even make you uneasy on one ground or another, but so long as you keep faith with us and perform your assigned tasks well, we will never allow you to suffer as a result.”

The screaming in the back of Crowley’s mind got louder, but his hand was perfectly steady as he flicked ash into the tray. “I see,” he said, with a dry mouth. “What has been done, has been done for the good of France.”

The near-sneer almost vanished. “I beg your pardon?”

“The Three Musketeers. The evil Cardinal Richelieu gives his agent Milady DeWinter - who is a fantastic villain, by the way, you can’t help rooting for her, except when she kills Constance - a note with his seal that she can show any official in France in order to get off scot-free, whatever she does. Of course the heroes get hold of it and use it themselves when they defeat her in a way that the local officials find questionable. I always thought it was dim of the Cardinal not to use some more precise phrase. Pieces of paper change hands pretty readily, even when first-class villains have charge of them.”

Old Mr Prince laughed out loud - dry and hard, but unquestionably genuine. “I’ll bear that in mind,” he said. “Yes, you have the general idea. If your instructions are to steal a bread knife out of Buckingham Palace, you are to do it however you need to and not worry about consequences. We’ll deal with those, and your success will be reflected in your allowance.”

“That’s fair,” lied Crowley. “And even if it weren’t - I’d still have to do it.”

“Just so.” Old Mr Prince nodded, and stubbed out his cigarette.
--

In the event, Aziraphale came to London more often than Crowley went to Oxford. Oxford was lovely, and Aziraphale got in with a small but congenial group who accepted Crowley’s (and occasionally Grimsby’s) visits as pleasant additions to their circle and saw nothing odd in Crowley staying overnight in Aziraphale’s chambers. 

(“I am informed from other sources that the set you describe is rumored to indulge in certain tastes, considered by the Crown to merit penal servitude, yet you make no mention of such activities, Mr Crowley. Why is that?”

The cigar was really very handy during Crowley’s quarterly reviews, which - since he seemed to be Old Mr Prince’s “favorite” - were conducted in person, though not always over tea. “Wasn’t sure anything I saw crossed the threshold of ‘interesting gossip.’ Nothing was actionable, and they chaff each other so much I can’t tell where truth lies in it.”

“I see. For future reference, this sort of gossip is always extremely interesting, and worth getting to the root of.” Old Mr Prince blew a smoke ring. “And if Angel wishes you to indulge him in the relevant vice, what will you do?”

“What would you wish me to do?” Crowley wasn’t even nervous; the counter question was the obvious, the only response.

“Oblige him, and report,” said Old Mr Prince. “Such things have their uses, and I reiterate that such things pose no danger to my boys - as long as their reports are thorough.”

His reports were not thorough. Angel knew all about the Prince Foundation, and was about to know more next time Crowley saw him. The Prince Foundation would know all about Angel over Crowley’s dead body.)

Aziraphale demonstrated a talent for ferreting out the best sources of food in town, and took such delight in explaining medieval literature to anyone who would listen that Crowley became tolerably enamored of the subject, or at least of the way it made Angel’s eyes light up and his hands fly and flutter all around him. The first time they got thoroughly drunk happened sitting up late in someone’s study, when Aziraphale and a fellow with an eyeglass got into an impassioned argument about the Lais of Marie de France which made Crowley laugh until he fell off the sofa, holding his sides while tears ran down his cheeks, to Aziraphale’s agitation and distress.  Aziraphale was a stage hand for his amateur dramatic society’s production of The Importance of Being Ernest, his prowess in moving sets being universally admired, and Crowley was in the audience and at the crew party afterward. Aziraphale had to join a rowing club to please his father, and Crowley was there, too, watching that adorable face contort as he tried to pull in synch with men who probably couldn’t even pick each other up without straining. Their days at Oxford were amusing, and their nights idyllic.

But London had the theaters, and the concert halls, and the galleries, and the cinematographs, and the obscure bookshops (all right, Oxford had those, too), and the restaurants that could light Aziraphale up like a bonfire. Crowley, sometimes on his own and sometimes with Grimsby (who had been born in Bethnal Green and regarded himself as an essential native guide for provincials like Crowley and Angel), spent his weeks exploring, ever on the lookout for something that would make Aziraphale forget that he was never quite sure he had done as well as he should have in writing essays or taking exams or doing any of the things that his father and Gabe were constantly urging him to do in order to “get out of his shell.” Crowley spread the delights of London before him and watched his eyes shine, his cheeks go round and pink, his smile spread all over his body, his hands and eyelashes flutter; heard his voice exclaim or moan or laugh out loud to express his pleasure. He witnessed the happy wiggle and knew himself to be its cause.

(“For Pete’s sake,” Gabe had complained, right there at dinner in front of the Americans as the footman served Aziraphale cherry tart, “haven’t you outgrown that damn wiggle yet?”) 

Because that was the best thing in the world, to Crowley, the thing that turned enjoyment into pure joy: being the cause of Aziraphale’s delight, a delight just as delicious if experienced from across the table over a really good dish of oysters as it was with Angel beneath him in a feather bed. (All right, so the Happy Wiggle was best in the feather bed.)They had to be careful how they touched each other in public, even (Grimsby and some of their sympathetic college friends warned them) how they looked at each other, but no one could fault them for eating together or sitting together in a concert hall, sharing what London had to offer, and Crowley did not hold back in that regard, channeling all his own appetites and longings and occasional mournful aches into the quest for Angel’s satisfaction.

After the confinement and discomfort of Wellborn Hall, Crowley’s situation in London was downright paradisial. He had a generous allowance; he had a tailor; he had both friends and connections; he had freedom to come and go almost as he pleased, with just enough sneaking necessary to keep his hand in. His difficulties with print were still a handicap when reading law, which involved far too many large blocks of text, but if he took his time, kept his ears open, marked up his books, took notes according to the systems he’d developed at Wellborn, and made judicious use of his fellow-students, who were always short of cash, these were still overcomeable. He saw Grimsby several times a week, becoming an honorary part of his social set and drawing him into his own. Despite his lowly status in the import house where he was employed, Grimsby really only needed the introduction and the occasional help in tweaking his wardrobe economically to fit in with the smart set the Prince Foundation obliged Crowley to cultivate. His own qualities and the possession of not one, but two, beautiful sisters were enough to offset his low birth and thin purse for most occasions.

All three tried dissipation, and didn’t care overmuch for it, generally leaving the smart set to their night clubs and pub crawls after only a drink or two themselves, and setting off together into the night, arm-in-arm, to explore London and talk. They took Grimsby’s youngest sibling to the panto; they saw every opera, ballet, music hall turn, concert, and play they could manage; they squired Grimsby’s sisters and their friends when they wanted to go out dancing; they attended duty-parties at the behest of their classmates (and sometimes at Mickey’s), collectively charming mothers and aunts to the point that they relaxed their vigilance over the affairs of said classmates and the young ladies who, for them, formed the chief attraction of the parties; once they realized that he was entirely serious this time they supported Grimsby through all the vicissitudes of his courtship of a highly respectable young lady named Mildred who made hats; and they had a wonderful time.

The errands the Prince Foundation asked Crowley to run did not, as yet, seem either too onerous or too troubling. Most weren’t even inconvenient. If he was going to Oxford, he might be asked to pick up a package from the back room of some small and nameless business in one of that city’s many narrow alleys, or to bring some other Prince Boy with him and find a way to introduce him, casually and seemingly by accident, to someone whom Aziraphale knew slightly. If he was planning to attend a performance, he might be given a message to pass to a certain member of the cast or crew - who might seem elated, or apprehensive, or sad, on its receipt, but who in any case bore no animus against him and who sometimes proved willing to improve his acquaintance, and therefore his access to theatrical London and his opportunities to surprise Aziraphale. Once he had to drop a toy boat off of London Bridge, and he would wonder off and on for the rest of his life what that had been about. A few times he had to take a day trip to Dover, and once spent part of his half-term holiday exchanging one bundle for another in Calais, but he was able to take Grimsby with him, and assist him in purchasing a quantity of dress goods that delighted both his beautiful sisters and the respectable hat-making Mildred.

Except where the Foundation’s demands interfered, he and Angel still managed to spend most of their holidays together, sometimes at Auldmon Abbey, but also taking The Lamb to the seaside (a treat both Fells had longed for from a young age, but which Lord Auldmon had never felt sufficiently at leisure to provide) and visiting sites of interest to the medievalist, about which Crowley feigned to completely miss the point, in the cause of getting Angel to start explaining, resulting in a breathless hour or so of animated storytelling, gestures, bright eyes, and other delightful things. They did not, in fact, manage to see each other every single week; but that they were drifting apart, no one could possibly assert, and Aziraphale’s anxiety on that point faded into the background.

They were both much too busy with exams, Grimsby’s wedding to Mildred, and plans for the Long Vac to pay much attention to the assassination of an Archduke in late June of their second year of university. They spent the beginning of July comfortably in Oxford, Crowley lounging and listening to gramophone records all day while Aziraphale feverishly worked on the translation and interpretation of a cycle of goliardic poetry until he got the draft sufficiently out of his system that he would be able to properly enjoy the leisurely boating trip down the Thames they were to make with the Lamb. Crowley’d had a pretty strenuous term, himself, wrangling with property law and a couple of complicated Prince errands, and felt all the better for having a quiet few weeks of domesticity in nearly empty student housing, preparing sausages and tea over a spirit lamp when neither of them felt energetic enough to go out for supper. Aziraphale was essentially finished and making sure he had all his bibliographical information properly noted on the day that Crowley came back from picking up buns for tea with the additional burden of a newspaper informing them that Austro-Hungary had declared war on Serbia. It looked a right mess, but had nothing to do with them.

Until it did.

First there was a telegram advising them of Lamb’s train time the next day; then there was one advising them to meet a different train; then there was one asking them to please await instructions. The pubs were full of people arguing about whether France was really going to follow Russia into taking sides, and whether or not the Territorial Troops would be wanted for mobilizing after their training ended on August Bank Holiday, and if they would, how long it would take to get the business over with. “It seems preposterous,” Aziraphale said, brooding over the newspaper spread over the tea table. “A war, in Europe, in this day and age?”

“Well, the armies are just sitting around,” Crowley pointed out, sprawled on the sofa under the open window playing cat’s cradle with an old bootlace. “Bound to use them for something, I suppose.”

“They do use them, but they’re primarily for hanging onto colonies these days. The idea of, of armies marching into Paris or Vienna seems simply grotesque.” Aziraphale tutted and rustled papers. “Though I suppose, if you live in Agra or Johannesburg, the idea of armies there is probably just as grotesque.”

“Mm. I don’t suppose it’ll come to that. Good thing Grimsby and Mildred decided going to Paris for the honeymoon wasn’t economical, though. Is Mickey still in Marseille?”

“As far as I know. It wasn’t Marseille itself, though. Some rural hamlet with a chateau to let, cheap.”

“Doesn’t sound much like her style.”

“I wouldn’t have thought so, but perhaps marriage has mellowed her. Though I’m not sure how it could, as little as she sees of Commander Dick.” Aziraphale left the papers all askew and joined Crowley on the couch, picking his legs up and setting them across his own comfortably sturdy thighs. “It might be nice to do that, ourselves, sometime. Rent a place, a very little one, close enough to some sizable town that we could run in to amuse ourselves, but far enough out to be private.”

“We’d need servants,” Crowley reminded him, dragging himself up until he counted, mostly, as sitting on Angel’s lap. “That’s not so very private.”

“Oh, I don’t know. A charlady once a week or so. We could learn to cook. You’re a dab hand at sausages these days, and I fancy the idea of learning to bake.” Aziraphale hoisted Crowley up to a more convenient position for kissing, which was always thrilling. Angel liked to be tempted and courted, spoiled and seduced, as much as Crowley liked tempting, courting, spoiling, and seducing him; but a change is as good as a rest and once in awhile, it was fun for Aziraphale to assert himself, and his strength, a little. “If we did it in Europe, I believe the laws in many countries are far more reasonable than they are here.”

“Your French is terrible, though.” It was; he kept muddling it up with Latin and Old French.

“Mm. Almost as bad as your German. Still, between us we could manage, where ever we went. I’m not contemplating spending - much time - talking - to the locals.” The kissing getting more absorbing at this point, and Crowley having dropped the cat’s cradle in favor of unbuttoning Aziraphale’s waistcoat, the conversation ended, and they were settling in nicely when they heard the distinctive sound of someone climbing the stairs. Crowley swore and started rebuttoning. “That’ll be the telegram telling us when to expect Joshua,” sighed Aziraphale. “I need to get the tip money.” 

“I’ll deal with it,” said Crowley. “You sit there and look all respectable on the outside, thinking about what we’ll do when he goes away again, on the inside.” 

As he arose, a second, heavily-thudding set of footsteps joined the first, causing them to raise their eyebrows at each other in puzzlement. Crowley was already at the door when the frantic knocking began, and a familiar voice called: “Angel? Crawly! It’s me!”

“Ligur?” Crowley opened the door to reveal not only Ligur, but a more-disheveled than usual Froggy Hastur on the landing. “What the deuce are you doing here?”

“That’s not a very nice greeting,” said Froggy, his eyes bloodshot, holding himself wearily.

“Sorry. You surprised me. We were expecting someone else.” Crowley stepped back.

Aziraphale rallied at once, unobtrusively adjusting his waistcoat as he stood. “Come in, come in. What a pleasant surprise. Hats by the door there - we don’t stand on ceremony here, certainly not during the vac. Would you like some tea?” He looked them up and down - Hastur’s sagging posture, the agitation in Ligur’s face and hands. “Something stronger?”

“Stronger! Yes!” Froggy brightened.

“This isn’t a social call,” said Ligur, at the same time. “I need to talk to you, Crawly. Privately.”

Crowley almost told him he didn’t grant private interviews to people who couldn’t remember his name, but something in Ligur’s manner made him hesitate, and Aziraphale, already at the mantelpiece with the decanter in his hand, spoke up. “My chamber is right through there. Make yourselves at home.” He held out a tulip glass to Hastur. “Here you go. On the one hand, it isn’t very good, but on the other hand, it’s cheap enough not to make an item in the budget worth Pater’s noticing.” 

He poured another for himself as Crowley, putting on the swagger to mask his distaste, showed Ligur into the room only he and Aziraphale should ever be in together, not stopping till he stood between the wardrobe and the window standing open to the summer afternoon, the slightly rumpled bed between them. “What’s the Foundation want with me so urgently they sent you running, then?”

Ligur closed the door and turned to scowl at him. “It’s not the Foundation. If you ever mention this to them, I will slice you to ribbons.”

“Oh, you will, will you?” Crowley did a tolerably good imitation of Old Mr Prince by now.

“Hastur will, then. It comes to the same thing.” He started pacing back and forth in front of the door, his movements jerky, as if powered by an engine with too great a head of steam. “Damn, I didn’t mean to start like that. There’s fifty pounds in it for you.”

“Fifty pounds?”

“Yes, believe it or not, I’m good at my jobs! Twenty-five now, twenty-five on delivery.”

“On delivery of what?”

“Of something important!” Ligur roared, and hit the door with his open palm.

“Hey, now, hey! You’ll hurt yourself! Take a breath. All right? Just a breath.” 

The door popped open and Aziraphale thrust a glass into Ligur’s unresisting hand. “We’re going to play the gramophone now,” he announced, and closed the door again. 

Ligur drank off the brandy in one long pull, then stood with his head against the door until “The Banks of Green Willow” began to play.  “All right,” he said. “All right.” He set the glass down on top of the wardrobe and began to pace again. “It’s a small package, about, oh, I dunno, a little bigger than a shoebox. But it’s vital to get it out and she - the holder won’t give it to Hastur, the stubborn - and I can’t go. I can’t. I’m in the middle of something, something really complicated for Prince, I’d tell them what to do with their job but -“

“But you can’t, yeah, I know. Of course you can’t.”

“I can’t afford the time to come up here to get you but here I am, that’s how important it is to get this, this package out.”

“Out?” Crowley’s skin was trying to crawl right off of him. “Where’m I going?”

Ligur fumbled two ten-pound notes, a fiver, and a folded piece of paper out of his notecase and thrust them toward him. “It’s in the south of France. The other information is a contact, if you need, once you’re in France, if you need, anything, bribe money to get you through, something extra to hire a fishing boat, whatever you need to complete the job. You go to that address, you collect the package, you bring it to me in London, you discuss it with no one, anywhere, ever. Including Old Mr Prince. Including Angel.” He stopped pacing. “Especially Angel.”

The information on the paper conveyed nothing to Crowley, but he tucked it away in his waistcoat pocket. “All right. Sure. I can do that.” Let Ligur apply “that” to any and all parts of his instructions he cared to - obviously he would be discussing this with Angel, but the rest of it, yes, Crowley could do. “You’re sure the - holder - will give it to me after turning away Froggy?”

“You don’t get to call him Froggy.” Ligur closed his eyes, opened them again. “Yes. I’m sure. And if I’m wrong - you get the package anyway. If it comes to that, it’ll be fifty pounds on delivery. But it won’t come to that. You’ll understand when you get there.”

“That’s all right then. Have you eaten?”

“No, and I can’t now. I have to motor straight back to London and - I don’t have time.” Ligur opened the door and stalked out. “Come along, Froggy - what are you eating?”

“Veal and ham pie,” said Angel briskly, presenting Ligur with another. “You can’t afford to take brandy on an empty stomach, believe me. Have a pleasant journey. Lovely to see you.” He shut the door behind them, and turned to smile encouragingly at Crowley. “We’ll have to go out again for more pies, I’m afraid. What was that about?”

“Not sure,” admitted Crowley. “But I know I don’t like it above half. Looks like I’m going to the south of France, which is all kinds of inconvenience, but I could hardly say no to the poor chap.”

“Certainly not, the state he was in. I’m sure the Lamb and I can manage the beginning of our trip around this.” Aziraphale opened his arms, his face crossed with worried lines, and Crowley came into them. “If the Foundation ever puts you into, into such a situation - whatever this situation may be - “

“Shh. I’m Old Mr  Prince’s favorite. I’ll be fine - oh, what the devil now?” As new footsteps on the stairs interrupted a soothing forehead kiss.

This time, it was a telegram. Aziraphale tipped the bearer, asked kindly after his mother, closed the door, and tore it open, anticipating a new arrival time for the Lamb, only to find a much longer missive than anticipated. He read it through once, his eyebrows elevating higher and higher until they disappeared into the untrimmed tumble of curls that had accumulated since his barber went on holiday. Crowley, already uneasy, began to fidget. “Well?”

“I’m - to fetch Mickey home,” said Aziraphale.

“That doesn’t sound like something one does to Mickey,” Crowley protested, resting his chin on Aziraphale’s shoulder to read for himself. “Trip postponed indefly, need you to collect Mickey 15 Rue - wait, wait, wait.” He fished Ligur’s piece of paper back out of his waistcoat pocket and held it out to compare them directly.  The addresses were identical.

“Dear me,” said Aziraphale.

Chapter Text

As boys, my brother, my friends, and I took “my book” very seriously, believing in it as much as or more than we believed in the contents of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, which no doubt had an interesting effect on our moral development. With age comes, if not wisdom, at least a broader knowledge base and a more complete grasp of literary conventions, and I now regard the contents as most probably being intended, by its creators, and read, by the intended audience, primarily as a satire using elements of both folk and religious tradition; though that it also held a place of importance (as opposed to reverence) in their lives is attested by the beauty of its decoration. (See Plates II-XX.)  This book was not a jape dashed off for the fleeting amusement of a handful of monks, but the result of years of labor by many skillful hands. Alas, it is not my lot to explore its relationship to the known Apocrypha, surviving traces of folk religion, and rustic tales of slyly stupid devils and dubiously virtuous monks; nor could I hope to trace the once-prominent individuals, institutions, events, and customs lampooned by the author, scribes, and artists involved in the production of this remarkable work. I must be satisfied with alerting a wider audience to its existence, with what I hope is a sound modern translation, and making the original available to any interested parties who are better equipped to follow some of the more intriguing scholarly paths it suggests. 

“Introduction” to The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

Miss Maud Silver rose early and breakfasted alone in the dining room of the small Ledlington hotel where she was staying while looking into the matter of the emerald knitting needles (so impractical yet so costly!), where she read the London papers with interest. The Westminster Bridge Body’s identity, a plea to the public for information filling in the gaps in his final day, and the authorization of a reward for information leading to the apprehension of the culprit had been released too late the previous day to benefit the evening editions, but were readily available to the morning dailies, and energetic pressmen had likewise obtained interviews with various connections of the deceased in plenty of time for them to appear amid the tea and toast. The more conservative papers, who had managed to wring information out of Michaela Hostmassif and Gabriel and Sandalphon Fell, made great play of the young, naive, and idealistic lordling being drawn into a secret and undesirable marriage amid murky hints of international Bolshevism and foreign plots, while Miss Anathema Device’s connections to London journalism paid off elsewhere in a heartrending tale of a widowed bride rescued from persecution and suddenly deprived of her savior before he could save the remainder of her beleaguered family. 

The deceased’s only full brother was universally described as prostrate with grief and hinted to be a near-invalid due to war heroism, an inherently weak and nervous constitution, or both. Those papers which had covered the “glittering Hostmassif Bonfire Masquerade Ball” referred back to it in order to evoke the irony of the carefree frolicking of the deceased’s family and friends while he was being brutally executed under the very noses of those watching the official fireworks display. The manager of the Soho Star Theater took the opportunity to tout the upcoming production in which Mrs Magdala Fell was to have the starring role and was expected to perform brilliantly in the face of her trials; possibly, honed by suffering, better than she would have without them. Mr Newton Pulsifer’s description of the closed dark car pulling away from the bookshop shortly after the arrival of the mysteriously fuelless motorbike and lights where lights had no business to be struck Miss Silver as especially important for this case; and she wondered, in a professional way, whether the inspector in charge had yet dispatched anyone to Lancashire to ask certain questions that arose in her own mind. However, it was nothing to do with any of the cases she had in hand, and she must catch the London train in time to conduct certain inquiries of her own on behalf of two different clients, so she collected her knitting bag - currently full of white and cherry yarn for the jumper she was knitting for her dear niece, Ethel Burkett - laid aside the newspapers, and walked to the Ledlington train station, looking forward to sleeping in her own bed for a few nights, before she returned bearing the fruits of her investigation on Saturday evening - assuming no new crisis arose in the meantime, which it should not, if her client had the sense to behave as she had instructed. (They didn't always, alas.)

In Scotland Yard, the switchboard was already busy fielding calls from those who had driven their closed, dark cars through Soho on the night of the Fifth of November, proclaiming their entire innocence of any useful knowledge, by the time Frank arrived. He had read the Times with rather bemused interest, for the figures in the story there did not quite match his impression of the figures in the case he was investigating. When one of the girls in the typing pool presented him with the scoop of the morning, which had the journalists of London gnashing their teeth with envy, however, he was fascinated. The Milltown Intelligencer, whose reporter had gone to Auldmon to record the heartbreak of the family, relegated all national news to the interior in order to fill the front page with a sensational account of a once lively and prosperous house shrouded in gloom, haunted by economic decline and labor unrest, presided over by a dying man whose doctor/brother refused all access to him on the grounds that the slightest disturbance, in the wake of the shock of his youngest (implied, favorite) son’s death and marriage, might prove fatal. Though Dr Fell emphasized the devotion of all family members for each other and the universal love Joshua “The Lamb” inspired in everyone who met him, the enterprising journalist had also located unnamed sources “close to the family” who described tension over lunch, sharp voices in the garden and the library, a distraught son forcing his way into the sickroom and emerging “white as a ghost, in a blazing fury,” throwing himself onto his motorbike without a word to anyone, and leaving his ancestral home for the last time “like a bat out of hell.”

“According to the hometown paper, both Gabriel Fell’s factories and Auldmon Abbey’s agricultural holdings have been in steady decline since before the international markets crashed,” Frank informed Inspector Lamb. “And even allowing for standards of journalism, this sounds like a much more serious quarrel than Gabriel and Sandalphon were willing to admit to us yesterday. Also, Dr Fell denies any knowledge of ‘the alleged marriage.’”

“Yes, it’s beginning to sound like a murder case at last,” said Inspector Lamb, with some satisfaction, skimming a pile of reports. “The tip line’s staggering under news of every motorbicyclist and dark-colored car that went anywhere in Britain on Guy Fawkes Day. We’ve got a man going around to the garages of all those directly involved, to see whose cars were and weren’t available to go to Soho that night. Also to see if anyone owns a towing hitch. The Foreign Office never heard of anybody, which means we needn’t go haring off after spies and whatnot, or worry about being shut down in a hurry. Meanwhile, until the canvassers have had a little more time and the people in charge of separating wheat from chaff have more wheat for us, it wouldn’t hurt to have another word with some Fells.”

The house of the Kensington Fells brooded amid its respectable neighbors this misty morning, with blinds drawn and the knocker muffled. The footman had just turned away a pair of disappointed journalists and seemed little inclined to treat officers of the law differently, but bowed to badges and necessity and left them in the hall for a few moments only, before conducting them into a small office near the back of the house. 

Though no one could fault the quality of anything in sight, everything about the interior here was inferior to the accommodations provided by Mrs Hostmassif; the rooms smaller and darker due to having fewer windows, the furniture less up-to-date. The office, while far more commodious than Miss Device’s writing room, was rather snug with both policemen, Gabriel, and Sandalphon in it, and it lacked both a telephone and convenient accommodations for a stenographer. The ashtrays overflowed and discarded newspapers, including the Milltown Intelligencer, occupied most of the horizontal surfaces of the room. Sandalphon’s solicitous blankness today made his face look heavy and solid as a boulder, while Gabriel’s range of expressions seemed to have been limited still further, all the grins giving way to an assortment of grimaces. He removed a half-smoked cigar from his mouth and said, without preamble: “I suppose you’re here about the filthy lies in that Milltown rag. Well, all I’ve got to say on the subject is that I’ll sue them to bankruptcy!”

“No, you won’t,” said Sandalphon, sounding tired. “Nothing in the article is actionable. Ignore them and sack whichever servants talked to the newspaper. It’s the only way.”

“I can see how the style of the story must be annoying to you,” said Inspector Lamb. “I take it you deny the substance and stand by what you said yesterday?”

“Of course we do!”

“Joshua appeared agitated when he emerged from his interview with Lord Auldmon, and left abruptly,” said Sandalphon. “Everything else is servant gossip and journalistic excess. If you think it’s important enough to go to Lancashire about, my father, wife, and stepmother will confirm that.”

“We may very well have to go to Lancashire, depending on what information the public is able to provide us this morning,” said Lamb. “We have great hopes of having the gaping holes in the story of your brother’s final day filled in by lunchtime, and the answer to the puzzle will then be that much closer. In the meantime, I was wondering if you could give us any insights into what Joshua’s marriage might mean to the family.”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Gabriel asked. “This scheming Jewish adventuress played on his sympathy and got herself a ticket out of Germany, possibly with an exaggerated idea of his net worth. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if something happened to put him wise, and she or her associates popped him off to cut their losses. If she thinks she’s getting an inheritance out of him, though, she’s got another think coming - we’re getting this marriage annulled.”

“Oh? On what grounds?”

“I’ll find something, if you don’t,” said Sandalphon. “Either she’s party to the murder and can’t inherit or - I’ll find something. We can easily keep things tied up till I have what I need.”

“Mr Crowley seemed confident that the marriage would hold up against any challenge.”

“Crawly? What’s he got to do with anything?” Gabriel sounded as surprised as contemptuous.

“He got the visa and drew up the couples’ new wills. He and Aziraphale witnessed the wedding.”

“New wills,” said Sandalphon, in a flat, expressionless voice.

Gabriel swore. “Crawly, Crawly, Crawly! We should have known. I don’t know what’s going on, Inspector, but you mark my words - Crawly’s at the bottom of it. This whole thing reeks of him. Big black car, like the one seen pulling away from the bookshop last night. Using my poor brother as an alibi. And now we find out he talked Joshua into using his services instead of Sandy’s? And connived at the marriage? He’s always had Sunshine wrapped around his finger, and that was halfway to wrapping Joshua around it, too.”

“We’re looking into him, certainly,” said Inspector Lamb. “But I can’t for the life of me see a motive for him in it.”

Gabriel and Sandalphon exchanged looks which presumably communicated something between them, but left Lamb and Frank none the wiser. “Don’t underestimate him,” said Gabriel. “He’s a wily devil and a troublemaker. Sandy. Did Sunshine ever update that will he made before he shipped out in the War?”

Sandy shook his head. “Never even discussed it with me. You think he - no. He’d have told me he was doing it.”

“Not if his dear boy told him not to. If Crawly plans to scoop the pot, and Joshua caught on -“

“The Inspector didn’t come here to listen to us guess,” Sandalphon interrupted. “Is there anything else you’d like to know?”

“A few things, yes. First of all - do either of you know what passed between Lord Auldmon and the deceased? Whatever occurred between Auldmon Abbey and Westminster Bridge, we need some idea of your brother’s state of mind when it happened, if we’re to have any hope of reconstructing events, and so far all we know is that whatever happened upset him.”

“My father was upset, too,” said Gabriel. “We aren’t in the habit of discussing unpleasant things with him unnecessarily, so we didn’t press him on the subject.”

“It is possible,” said Sandalphon slowly, “that I could persuade my father to telephone you with the information. He was not inside the room when Joshua barged in, but my wife was and she would undoubtedly have told my father all about it, even if my uncle was unwilling or unable to discuss it. Would that satisfy you?”

“No,” said the Inspector. “But if you can arrange for Lord Auldmon himself to call me, his testimony would be very helpful, and we would undertake not to overtax him. If he is too prostrate even  for the telephone, speaking to your wife might suffice until we can get someone in to interview him. In the meantime, I’m trying to establish a firm timeline of events, and in the interest of avoiding confusion I’d like to get some anchor points nailed down. You say that Joshua left Auldmon Abbey around four o’clock.”

“That’s right,” said Gabriel. “And whatever that rag tells you, he did not storm out without talking to anyone. I tried to get him to stay for tea, but he was in a temper and wouldn’t listen. I didn’t do anything as convenient as look at the clock, but it was near enough to teatime that it would have made far more sense for him to stay, so say any time between four and four-thirty.”

“By the way, did his bike appear to be in good working order when it left?”

Sandalphon shrugged. “We didn’t notice anything wrong with it, but it was parked in the stable block and we didn’t observe it closely. The newspapers are saying the tank was dry when it was found by the police. Is that significant?”

“Very significant indeed. Somebody’d punched a hole in the fuel tank, in an inconspicuous location, but of sufficient size that he wouldn’t have been able to drive it for long after the puncture was made without adding more petrol every few miles and leaving a trail of leaking fuel. You may be sure we’ll be checking in with every business serving the motor trade along his route. I don’t suppose you noticed anyone at the Abbey taking an undue interest in the machine?”

“Our servants have too much to do to be wasting time with such things,” said Gabriel. “And I’m sure they would have alerted us to any strangers they saw hanging about. Probably would have told the damned reporter, too. I expect he stopped for tea somewhere and it happened then.”

“You’re guessing again, Bolt.” Sandalphon got them both fresh cigars, and cut the ends off. “Stop it. The police are professional guessers and can be assumed to be better at it than you are.”

Inspector Lamb ignored this byplay. “What time did you leave, yourselves?”

“Us?” Gabriel looked surprised. “What difference does that make?”

Lamb shrugged. “Probably none, but all we need in this case is someone claiming to have seen him with people fitting your description, and not have means of showing that it couldn’t have been you - or him, for that matter. A great deal of time can be wasted on such mistaken identifications.”

“We had a small tea at four-thirty,” said Sandalphon, “at which point our bags were already in the car. At about five we called Michaela to warn her we would be late and asking her to put back some dinner for us, which we’d eat on arrival before getting into our costumes. We drove straight through, arriving between nine and nine-thirty. Is that satisfactory?”

“I presume your driver can confirm these times?”

“I drove,” said Gabriel.

“And the make and model of the car?”

“A 1929 Bentley saloon car, dark blue,” said Gabriel. “With the supercharged engine. I couldn’t have made it to the party before the fireworks in anything slower.”

“Did you notice any signs, on your way down, that you were crossing Joshua’s path? Spot his motorbike parked at a petrol station, anything like that?”

Sandalphon and Gabriel looked at each other again; Sandalphon shook his head. “No, but I wouldn’t have,” said Gabriel. “I wasn’t looking for motorbikes. I was thinking about making time.” His grimace seemed half amused. “Honestly, if I’d seen the kid stranded I might not have stopped for him, I was so miffed with him for upsetting the old man. I probably would have thought it served him right and been tempted to blow on past.”

“Very natural, I’m sure, and I’m glad you haven’t got that on you conscience. If you had seen him and picked him up, it almost certainly would have saved his life.” Inspector Lamb gave them a moment to react to that, but Gabriel merely nodded, and Sandalphon maintained his neutrality. “Five o’clock in Lancashire, in Richmond by nine-thirty is good time. Did anyone see you arrive at the party?”

Gabriel blew out a breath. “Let’s see - I’m not sure - we parked ourselves in the mews and slipped in, since the party was already underway and we didn’t have our costumes on yet. Went to eat our dinners off the sideboard as fast as we could, ran upstairs, and changed. If anyone saw us we didn’t see them. Except Ruth. She saw us in the hall, but we only waved in passing. I’m afraid she’s not very good at keeping track of time, so that’s not much good to you.”

“I see. Is your wife available?”

“Not really. She’s been in the nursery all morning. The kids loved Josh, when he was around, and she’s been dealing with them. What difference does it make? You said yesterday you didn’t need to talk to her anymore.” 

In the hall, the telephone rang.

“I’m afraid you’ll find we often need to come back and check one more detail, as we get more and often contradictory information. We’ll do our best not to intrude. I believe this will do for now. Abbot -“

Frank closed his notebook and followed Lamb out into the hall as the footman murmured: “One moment, sir,” and lay the receiver on the table beside the phone. Gabriel looked out into the hallway as he proceeded toward the stairs. “Who’s that on the ‘phone?”

“Mr Aziraphale for Mrs Fell, sir.”

“Oh, for - I’ll get it, you show these two out.” Gabriel stalked into the hall and snatched up the receiver, barking into it: “Sunshine! What the deuce are you asking for Ruth for? I’m the one you need to talk to...I think she’s got enough on her plate without that. The kids are wrecks...No, nobody’s meeting anybody over lunch!....Because, you idiot -“ The rest of his words were cut off by the closing of the front door behind them. 

Frank and the Inspector looked at each other. “I don’t think he likes his wife talking to people,” said Frank, as they descended to the car.

“Some men don’t,” said the Inspector. “And that’s not illegal, so it’s not our concern.” He waited until they were shut up in the car and Frank had started the engine to add: “He wants Crowley or his brand-new sister-in-law to be guilty. I wonder what he’d have tried to put us onto, if his cousin hadn’t been there advising him to shut his mouth.”

“I can see the line he’s on,” admitted Frank, heading for Richmond. “If Aziraphale’s made a will benefiting Crowley, and meets with an unfortunate accident shortly after Lord Auldmon finally obliges his loving family by pegging out -“

“Hm. A jury wouldn’t like it. Besides - not to put too fine a point on it - regardless of what Gabriel thinks, for my money, if anybody’s wrapped around anybody’s finger, Aziraphale’s the finger and Crowley’s the one wrapped up tight. He’s also the one with the posh car and the little place in the country and the Mayfair flat and the manservant. Now, maybe he’s living beyond his means, and maybe he’s induced his old chum to favor him in his will - but until we learn either of those things, which we may before the day’s out, that’s maybes on top of ifs, that, if proved, don’t prove anything.  Even one witness who saw Joshua with anybody between teatime Monday and the finding of the body can give us a road to go down. Till then it’s all airy-fairy nothing.”

“Speaking of airy-fairy nothings,” said Frank, who had been turning a particular issue over in his mind since the previous day. “I didn’t think anything particularly of seeing a jar of Vaseline on Aziraphale’s bedside table yesterday, but having met him - and seeing how he and Crowley, well, how they are, it, ahem, crossed my mind -“ 

Inspector Lamb laughed. “Are you afraid of shocking me? That sort of thing wasn’t invented by public school boys, you know! Officially Vaseline is only Vaseline and there’s no proof of anything. Unofficially, yes, of course they’re in perpetual danger of being sent down for two years hard labor, but I told them I wasn’t concerned with anything short of murder, and I’m not. Oh, by the letter of the law, it’s more our business than Gabriel’s attitude toward his wife is, but it doesn’t affect our case, except that the more determinedly we ignore it, the more forthcoming his neighbors will be - for you can’t tell me a fair bit of the stonewalling we got yesterday wasn’t on this very account. I’ve seen less obvious nancies than Aziraphale doing the can-can in wigs and satin petticoats. It’s got to be an open secret in the neighborhood, but decent landlords aren’t so thick on the ground that anybody wants to be the one who gets them sent off, however they feel about their personal habits.”

“All right,” said Frank, relaxing. “Only - secrets breed motives. Particularly one like that.”

“They do, but look at the timing. If Joshua’d been killed before going to Lancashire, we’d be much more interested in those two, because it’s the kind of information that can disrupt a whole family. If he was of a mind to spill secrets, killing him after he’d been to see Lord Auldmon would be too late. Besides, he’d probably known about it for years. One doesn’t think of perverts being fond of each other, or setting up domestically, or having families, but you actually see it a fair bit in the older ones, and those close to them stop finding anything odd in it. No, there’s nothing for us there, so far.”

Next stop was Richmond, where they drove around to the mews and met the policeman in charge of discreet inquiries about dark, closed cars. “No soap,” he reported. “Crowley got his Bentley out Friday afternoon, returned it yesterday evening, could have been almost anywhere in England between those times, not that we expected any different. The garage men say he drives like a madman but never has an accident. They seem to feel a certain grievance in the matter. The Kensington Fells only keep one car, and only when the master’s in town. The Hostmassifs keep two cars, this cream Lagonda and that black Daimler over there, but according to the attendant, Mrs Hostmassif only drives her Lagonda. The Daimler hasn’t been out, that anyone can swear to, since Miss Ligur took it Sunday afternoon.”

“Miss Ligur drove it?” Frank took a second look. The Daimler was several years old, but immaculately kept. He couldn’t imagine any employer allowing a mere personal secretary to borrow it.

“Nice work if you can get it, I’ll say! Unfortunately the Hostmassif masquerade wasn’t the only party on this street on the Fifth. There was a lot of coming and going and the chauffeurs and garage boys had a bit of a party of their own. Nobody remembers Gabriel and Sandalphon Fell parking their Bentley, but it was here in the morning so they must have done. By the same token, they can swear all they like that the Daimler never moved, but they don’t keep a mileage record on it and their memory’s not worth much.”

“I don’t suppose anyone noticed a motorbike, or any one or anything unexpected in the vicinity?”

“If you ask me, the boys here wouldn’t have noticed their own heads at the time. They were enjoying themselves far too much for that.”

When they proceeded to the front door, the housemaid informed them that Mrs Hostmassif was engaged in her office, but put them into the drawing room where they had first met the Fells, and they were once again attended to by Miss Ligur. She looked every bit as cool and professional as she had the day before, but did not offer them refreshments. “Mrs Hostmassif wasn’t expecting you back,” she said. 

“We shouldn’t have to trouble her long.” Frank gave her a smile that generally went over well with females in service capacities.  

“In fact, you may be able to help us as well as she can,” said Inspector Abbot. “You have, I presume, seen the papers?”

“Some of them.”

“Then you are aware that an appeal has been made to the public, with prospect of a reward. These appeals have a tendency to be a little too productive and we’d like to have some anchor points nailed down in order to help us separate wheat from chaff. If, for example, someone reports seeing a woman in a black Daimler towing a motorbike through Kent on Monday afternoon -“

“You’re looking for alibis.” Miss Ligur’s face was cool as a cucumber, but her voice took on a steely edge, and she folded her arms. “ Is there some reason to think anyone in this household would need one?”

“We know somebody needs one, and we don’t know who yet. Believe it or not, we don’t collect alibis hoping to break them. A good alibi narrows the suspect pool a good bit.”

“Very well, but Mrs Hostmassif already told you that she was here all day Monday, preparing for the party, and I was assisting her. We both spent a lot of time during the day on the telephone and instructing the staff, and once the party began we only set foot outside the house for the fireworks. If it ever comes to that, we can easily alibi each other, with additional confirmation from servants, caterers, costumers, and guests.”

“ It was a masquerade party, and a full house.”

“It was a party for the guests. For me, believe me, it was work!” She’s borrowed that lofty expression from her mistress, and she’s got it down pat, thought Frank. “And yes, we wore costumes, and a lot of people had similar ones to each other, so I suppose some alibis for those times might be muddled; but Mrs Hostmassif makes a memorable Boadicea and I assure you, her time is all accounted for. If you wish to confirm that, I can give you the guest list and you can ask them - when you show me a warrant.”

“Fair enough, miss, and I hope it never comes to that! Do you remember when Gabriel and Sandalphon Fell arrived?”

“I don’t remember seeing them till almost midnight, after the fireworks ended. But then, I was very busy, and might not have. The party spread across several rooms shortly after we rose from dinner at nine.”

“You are familiar with all the invited guests?”

“All except Mrs Hostmassif’s brother Joshua. I have never met him, and didn’t see him when I dropped off the invitation. As I told you. Yesterday.”

“And you didn’t at any point in the evening see anyone you didn’t know?”

“Certainly not. If I had I would have spoken to them and probably evicted them. Nothing spoils a party like gatecrashers nabbing the drinks and getting rowdy.”

“By the way, you drove a large black car when you dropped off Joshua’s invitation?”

“Yes, I did.” Miss Ligur rapped out the words sharply, with evident contempt for this blatant attempt to take her off guard.

“Do you often drive your mistress’s car?”

“Sometimes. Cars need to be driven occasionally or something goes wrong with them. I’m not sure what, but Captain Hostmassif specifically wants the Daimler to be ‘exercised,’ as he puts it, regularly, while he’s at sea, and the keys hang from a nail by the back door, so I sometimes use it for errands.”

Frank tried his smile again. “That’s quite a perk, if you like driving at all.”

Miss Ligur leveled a cool, unamused gaze at him. “I suppose it is, if you do.”

The door opened and Mrs Hostmassif entered, dressed to go out in impeccable black. “Good morning, Inspector, Sergeant. Why are you interrogating my secretary?”

“Just trying to save trouble later, ma’am, and hoping to avoid disturbing you. Since you’re here, however - “

“Yes. Since I’m here.” Another woman might have sat, or leaned in the doorway, or looked at her wristwatch. Mrs Hostmassif folded her arms and regarded the Inspector with lofty patience.

“Do any facts that have come out in the papers throw any of your statements of yesterday into a new light? Are there any questions you might have answered differently had you seen the press reports first?”

“No. But - since you are here - not everyone in the family is a complete ass. The existence of a Jewish refugee sister-in-law is a shock, but I don’t know yet whether it’s an unpleasant one. I am, in fact, off to take Ruth shopping for mourning for the children and then to a restaurant where we will, absolutely by accident, as I will explain to Gabriel when he lays into Ruth about it, run into Sunshine, Magdala, and that playwright who claims to have been friends with Joshua.”

“Claims to?”

Mrs Hostmassif shrugged. “I don’t remember her, but I wouldn’t know most of Joshua’s friends if I met them on the street wearing signs. As far as I was concerned he was an infant the whole time I was growing up, and I was married and living in London before he matured enough to be moderately interesting. I think he played with the housekeeper’s granddaughter sometimes and our housekeeper’s name was Device, so there’s every possibility she’s telling the truth. Unlike Gabriel, I’m not leaping to the conclusion that these women are part of some conspiracy against the family using Sunshine as a dupe. They might be. I don’t know them yet. I need to. And poor Ruth needs to meet them, too, whether my brother wants her to, or not.” She sighed, and a shadow less of grief than of weariness crossed her face. 

Out in the hall, the doorbell rang. 

Mrs Hostmassif began to speak with more apparent care and emphasis, speaking faster as she went on.“Gabriel is...under a lot of strain right now. In addition to Joshua’s death, he’s having trouble at our factories, the harvest was bad, and the same newspapers that are telling the world our business will have informed him that an investment he expected to pay off well, won’t. He refuses help from anyone except Sandy, even though I’ve offered, time and again, to take the management of the factories off his hands. He won’t take investment advice from me, either, despite my having a much better track record at it. Which...is neither here nor there. Excuse me.” She took a deep breath. “As you can tell, I’m not entirely in control of myself, either, but it’s much worse for Gabriel. He’s got too much pride, and is too stubborn, and has too much on his plate. Which means he’s likely to say stupid things if Sandy can’t stop him in time. I don’t want you getting ideas about him, just because he talks rubbish to you.”

Frank should have kept quiet, but he had a hunch and it popped out. “Do you mean, things like his animus against Mr Crowley?”

Behind Frank and the Inspector, the door to the main hall opened. “Crawly? Are the police here asking about Crawly?”

Mrs Hostmassif closed her eyes and appeared to accept the weight of the world landing on her shoulders with a massive thud.

“Uncle Froggy,” said Miss Ligur, in a voice so patient, so put-upon, and so unprofessional Frank could hardly believe it was hers, “if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times - call first!”

The newcomer was a tall, startlingly pale man of middle years, with a shock of fair hair going gray, wearing a suit that almost fit him. He regarded Frank and the Inspector with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Fred Hastur. Uriel’s guardian. Came to see how she’s doing, and the maid tells me there’s police in the house.”

“She shouldn’t have,” said Mrs Hostmassif, in a tone that didn’t bode well for the housemaid. Uriel, looking mortified, tried to move to her guardian’s side with her usual cool aplomb, but was sufficiently agitated to trip on the ottoman on the way.

Mr Hastur ignored them both. “And what do I hear as I come through the door, but an old familiar name. Tell me, Mr Policeman. Is Anthony J. Crowley, attorney at law and prancing waste of breath, a suspect?”

“Should he be?” The Inspector inquired. “If you have information - “

Mr Hastur shook his head ponderously. “Me? Naw. But I will say this. This isn’t the first suspicious untimely death Mr Crawly’s been involved in.”

“That’s got nothing to do with this,” said Miss Ligur, tugging at his arm. “Come along to the study - if -“ She cast an appealing look at her mistress.

“Go, go.” Mrs Hostmassif waved her off, and Miss Ligur practically dragged him out. “I need to be gone, too, detectives, so if there’s nothing else -?”

“Do you happen to know what he’s talking about, ma’am?” Inspector Lamb asked.

“I do, and it’s irrelevant. It’s also a matter of public record. If you’re interested, you can detect about it.” She rang the bell, and the housemaid appeared looking as impassive as if she hadn’t been listening. “I’ll be out until after lunch. These gentlemen are just going. And I will wish to speak to you when I return.”

“Mr Hastur’s a large man, madam. I couldn’t stop him.” The housemaid had Frank and the Inspector’s hats in her hands, and handed them over.

“You could, however, have refrained from telling him who else was here. Good day!” She swept out of the room as regally as if she wore a cape three blocks long; and the policemen, perforce, trailed in her wake.

Chapter Text

“But they can’t find a baby following a star,” protested the Serpent. “The star’s above the whole town. What are they supposed to do, go about knocking on doors asking people if they’ve got a baby who needs expensive presents?” Then said the Angel Aziraphale: “Don’t look at me! I didn’t write the prophecy. But I must see to its fulfillment, and therefore, when they arrive, I will appear as a star balanced on the ridgepole of the building wherein the infant savior lies, so that they cannot mistake it. Alas, watching over the Holy Family is a task which consumes much of my time and attention, and I fear that I will not witness the arrival of the Kings in a timely manner.” He wrung his hands and bit his lip with worry. Then the Serpent said:“As for me, I have nothing to do save lie in wait for them, so that I may strive to tempt them to step aside from their paths, for as my masters wish so I will surely do. And when they are safely gone off in the wrong direction, I will visit you and taunt you. Then you may take on the appearance of the star, for all the good it does anyone. Thus your duty and mine will both be done.” Aziraphale then ceased his fretting, and smiled as brightly as the sun, so that the Serpent’s eyes were dazzled, and he said: “Oh, would you?” Thus they agreed, and thus they finished off the wine together, for the day had been a long and thirsty one. 

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

They had plenty of time to talk the whole situation over - on the boat train, on the boat, in the Renault Victoria hire car that Crowley wrested out of Ligur’s contact in Calais, since the trains were full of soldiers being shunted hither and yon. The roads were not without their military obstacles, either, but at least they could keep moving, and could occupy some of their increasingly frantic excess brain capacity with on-the-road driving lessons for Aziraphale. France was in the grip of a sense of urgency that reached out to seize them before they set foot on its soil, and that squeezed steadily tighter as they drove south. Aziraphale’s forehead got creases stuck in it, and he wrung his hands as he slept in the back of the Renault while Crowley drove through the night, waking at dawn to bolt foul black coffee and the best rolls they could scrounge up , and drive as best he could while Crowley slept fitfully, waking with every jerky stop Aziraphale made.

It was late afternoon and Crowley had no idea how long they'd been on the road when they located the address, but Crowley didn’t realize that at first, as it was more of a holiday cottage than a chateau, outside a village so small it hadn’t been on the map. They’d had to stop every few miles, once they finally reached Provence, to ask if they were still on the correct road for it, which exacerbated their anxiety. Crowley sat in the car comparing the address on the telegram to the address on the gatepost, over and over, blearily reviewing all the possible conversations they would need to have in order to get inside, hearing Ligur’s snarl as he especially included Angel among those with whom this errand was not to be discussed. Aziraphale slid out of the passenger seat and trotted up to the house, calling: “Coo-ee! Mickey!” He knocked on the door and rang the bell. Inside, a baby started crying. Footsteps stamped across the floor and the door flew open as Crowley hurried up the front walk to join him. 

Michaela Hostmassif’s hair hung in ratstails around her face. She was dressed like a French farmwoman, with an apron that had not prevented something unsavory from crusting on one shoulder. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face haggard, and her voice sounded like a rocky field crumbling in an earthquake. “We’d just gotten her to sleep and you woke her up, you imbecile! What are you doing here? I told Pater I could get myself home!” 

“Yes, I can see that, excellent job,” said Aziraphale. In the next room, an infant wailed as if the world was ending and it was personally affronted by the fact.  “Just to be clear, if Pater had sent me after you before John Ligur commissioned Crowley to come here to collect a package slightly bigger than a shoebox, I would have been highly skeptical of my ability to do so, but when both commissions were added together it began to seem that I might be of some assistance.” He smiled at her hopefully. Someone began crooning: “Chut! Plus de bruit c’est la ronde de nuit” under the sound of crying.

Mickey raised her hand as if to slap her brother, checked herself, and hit the doorframe instead. “Damn him! First Froggy and now this!? He should have come himself!”

“Yeah, he knows that,” said Crowley. “He wanted to. Was damn near desperate to, but it wasn’t up to him, was it? And he threatened me with the tortures of the damned if I told anybody what I was up to, especially Aziraphale, so don’t lay this on him. Blame him for sending Hastur all you like - it was a particularly stupid thing to do. You’ll have your chance to tell him so in vivid detail, soon.”

Mickey hit the doorframe again and began to cry, harsh ugly sobs torn straight out of the center of her. Aziraphale enfolded her in one of his all-encompassing impossibly soft hugs and she sagged on top of him. Crowley had never seen her touch Aziraphale before; had barely ever heard her speak to him. He slipped past them to follow the sound of crying.

The nursery was very clean, the afternoon light softened by pale blue curtains. The muscular, buxom woman walking up and down the room did not let singing: “En diligence, faisons silence Marchons sans bruit, c’est la ronde de nuit” prevent her from regarding Crowley with deep suspicion. The baby she carried was a beautiful shade of deep brown, lighter than her father, her frilled cap slipping off soft, tightly-curled black hair. Crowley’s  French had become more facile and better-accented during the drive, and he had no difficulty making himself understood. “Sorry. The father sent us. That’s Madame’s brother in there. He didn’t mean to wake the baby. None of the things she’s been afraid would happen, are going to happen.”

The nursemaid looked him up and down. “You look better than the last one, anyhow. Show me how you hold a baby.” 

Crowley did not let his mask of confidence slip. He could see how this professional held a baby. He could remember, once, long ago, there had been a bairn, and his Gran folding his arms around it, telling him to hold the head, aye, so - and then there’d been no bairn, and no Mam either, but now was not the time to think about that, but to take what was offered him, this little package not much bigger than a shoebox, which fell silent and blinked at him as if in surprise as he settled her in his folded arms, holding her head, aye, so.

“She likes you,” said the nursemaid. “Good. Neither one of us would have crossed the street with that other one, to say nothing of the Channel. And Madame was not leaving until she found someone to take us to England. She could not do it herself. If she sees anyone she knows - she is ruined. You understand?”

“I do understand. No fear of that, now.” But so many other things to fear. They hadn’t heard the worst of it yet, and Crowley was so tired, and Ligur and Mickey’s baby was so small.

“Her name’s Uriel,” said Mickey, behind him. 

“Uriel,” Aziraphale cooed, coming in for a peek. She blew bubbles at him, blinking eyes with a long frill of lash. “Goodness, how lovely she is!”

“Not that I can ever show her off,” said Mickey, sinking into the rocking chair in the corner. 

“Yes, yes, that’s all clear enough,” said Crowley. “Obviously the world at large, and Dick, and Gabe et al., have to be kept in the dark. But you should have trusted Aziraphale to begin with. Or Raffles-and-Ruth. Raffles-and-Ruth would’ve been ideal, honestly.”

“Ruth would adore her,” said Aziraphale. “Yes, she would adore you, you little precious!”

“Ruth’s too honest to keep a secret,” said Mickey, “and telling Raffles is the same as tell Ruth.”

“Hold her,” said the nursemaid, in French, to Aziraphale. 

He blinked at her. “Me? I mean, moi? Goodness, I’m not sure -“

“S’easy, Angel,” said Crowley, and showed him how, watching the nursemaid watch the glow of delight in his face intensify, like limelight coming up in a theater, as Uriel settled in his arms.  You couldn’t not trust Aziraphale with a baby.

“Well, it’s all right now,” sighed Mickey. “Crowley can drive Uriel and Jeannette to the boat and take them to John, Aziraphale and I can follow by train, take as long as we need, show ourselves at Auldmon Abbey and recount our adventures and then - what?”

Crowley and Aziraphale were both shaking their heads. Aziraphale deferred to Crowley with a look. “Germany’s invaded Belgium on its way into France.” Jeannette made a small sound of dismay; Aziraphale gave her his most reassuring look and Crowley made note of the fact that she at least understood some English, which would make life that much easier going forward. “We’ll all have to go through Gibraltar.”

“Gibraltar! But -“

“Or Lisbon, if you’re going to insist on not being seen by anybody British, but that’s just making things harder on ourselves. If you have any naval connections that can get us out through Marseille, that’d be even better? Naw, didn’t think so. Ligur suggested hiring a fishing boat, but that was before hostilities actually started. The Mediterranean’s likely to be a chancy place and we’d still have to get through Gibraltar and up the Channel - if I were a French fisherman I wouldn’t touch it for less than the price of a new boat. The French ports are clogged with rich American tourists trying to get home before the bullets fly, Mickey. If you’re not willing to pull influence we’ll be all week getting out.”

“But I can’t - “

“Yes, you can,” said Aziraphale, holding Uriel close to his heart as her eyes closed, and stayed closed. “Once we leave here, there’s no one to say whose daughter Uriel is. We can say she’s mine, or Crowley’s, whose mother has died - no one we meet will know any better, or think any the worse of us for it. We can tell them any story we like, and no one will care or think too hard about it, because there’s so much else going on. Can either of you drive at all?”

Mickey sank back in the rocking chair; defeated, or gathering her forces for the next onslaught, Crowley wasn’t sure. “I can. Are there even driveable roads through the Pyrenees?”

“We’ll find out,” said Crowley. “But first, I think everyone here needs some sleep.”

--
Getting to Gibraltar was an adventure, if anything can be counted an adventure that involves nappy changes, but once she got some rest and took over the plan of action enough that it counted as her own, Mickey proved to be ruthlessly good at adventure. She also demonstrated that she did not regard a baby, her brother, or her nursemaid as legitimate targets for the byproducts of frustration and rage, by sniping at Crowley the entire way across the Pyrenees; but she appeared in complete command of herself once they attained Gibraltar. By the time they disembarked at Plymouth amid crowds of disgruntled Americans and agitated Englishmen, she had almost completely detached herself from Uriel’s care, and when the time came for Crowley and Jeannette to disembark in London while Aziraphale and Mickey carried on to Lancashire, kissed her good-by almost as if she were someone else’s baby, briefly bonded with under the exigencies of travel and now dismissed from her mind forever. Uriel had cried from Plymouth to Salisbury, where she had abruptly fallen asleep in the middle of a long song about clear fountains and nightingales and absent love, which the French apparently considered a suitable lullaby; now she whimpered, and seemed inclined to wake. Crowley hoped she wouldn’t need a nappy change before they achieved Ligur’s flat, and that he’d made some sort of preparations for accommodating a baby.

Jeannette’s English had proven to be tolerably adequate for professional and travel purposes during the trip, but she retreated into French in the cab. Without Mickey’s backing, and in a foreign land, she seemed noticeably smaller; but perhaps she was only tired. “Madam is very cold, when she is not very hot,” she said, molding her body around the baby so that the cab’s more abrupt motions were canceled or smoothed out. “What is Monsieur like?”

“For these purposes, I have no idea,” Crowley admitted. “But don’t be afraid of him. Fear makes him cruel.” He knew how to manage Ligur, but as for telling someone else how - “He needs respect, desperately, but you’ll also need to make him respect you. I doubt he knows anything about babies, but he was frantic to get her here and that has to count for something. Whatever happens, whatever he does, pretend you don’t notice anything that doesn’t have to do with Uriel. He has - a lot of demands on him. As many as Madam. Probably more. Oh. And Froggy’ll probably be there a lot. The first man who came. Froggy Hastur is not a man you want to be alone with, but he’s probably the only real friend Ligur has, so - ”

Jeannette sniffed. “Him, I can handle!”

Crowley considered Hastur. He wasn’t sure what the man did for a living, but he remembered running into him once, in the washroom of a pub, smiling as he washed fresh blood from his knuckles, and he looked at Jeannette cradling that little scrap of brown humanity, with so many weights against her in the scales of life, and felt sick. “Sure, sure,” he said, “but be careful, all the same. If you need - anything - and Ligur doesn’t come through - here, let me write you out some addresses.” Him, and Aziraphale, and Raffles, and - hell, put down Grimsby - but things were unsettled now, uniforms where ever he looked, the middle of the long vac, the beginning of a war, and where would anyone be tomorrow or the next day? He gave her the addresses, and the remains of the twenty-five pounds Ligur had paid him in Oxford. “That’s for you. For emergencies. You’ve earned it. Keep it safe.” 

Crowley had never been to Ligur’s flat before. It was in a high, narrow house in Bayswater, on a lower floor, with a manservant to answer the door and a great deal of smoke in the sitting room, where Ligur paced and Hastur lounged. Ligur dropped his cigarette into an ashtray and darted into the foyer as soon as he heard Crowley’s voice. “Where have you been?”

“Crossing France, Spain, and the Channel,” said Crowley, “and here they are, safe and sound. This is Jeannette, and this is Uriel.” 

“Uriel,” said Ligur, freezing within arm’s reach of her. 

Jeannette held her up so he could see her, and she stirred. “Hold her,” she said, in English. She had caught a bit of accent here, a turn of phrase there, from her traveling companions, and spoke with authority and confidence. “Let’s see how you do.”

“I - she’s tiny. Froggy said she was tiny, but - she’s tiny.”

“Don’t be an ass, Ligur,” said Crowley. “If I can hold her lurching across the damn Pyrenees, you can hold her in your foyer.”

Hesitantly, Ligur took her, letting Jeannette guide his hands to support her. She opened her eyes and yawned, stretching her little toothless mouth into odd shapes. Her father stared down at her, face a mixture of terror and wonder. “I didn’t expect her to be beautiful,” he said.

She smacked her lips at him. A new smell invaded the tobacco and floor wax atmosphere of the foyer, and she scrunched up her face to cry. Ligur laughed, a sound very close to a sob. “Well. That’s me told.”

He gave her back to Jeannette. The manservant, carrying Jeannette’s suitcase and Uriel’s much larger bundle of luggage, led them further into the flat, murmuring about makeshift accommodations and please to let him know what was wanting. Ligur stared after them, then turned on Crowley, trying to pull his usual ease over himself like a cloak, and not quite succeeding. “Mickey?”

“On her way to Lancashire with Angel and do not light into me about that! What was I supposed to do when he got a telegram right after you left, telling him to go fetch her and giving him the same address you gave me? He won’t tell on her. What do you take him for? What do you take any of us for? If Mickey’d trusted Aziraphale to begin with everything could have been managed a lot more smoothly and we wouldn’t have had to scramble out of Europe one way while the Germans invaded in the other.”

“If she’d let me take the kid when I went over for it you wouldn’t have had to know a thing about it,” said Hastur, standing in the doorway of the drawing room. He was in his shirtsleeves, his voice hoarse with smoke and drink.

“If either of you’d had the sense God gave you, you’d have known nobody’d trust Hastur to shepherd a babe-in-arms through France and across the Channel! No offense, mate, but as a nursery maid you make an excellent rugby player.”

“All right, all right,” said Ligur. “All’s well that ends well and so on.”

“Ends, hell. This is the beginning.” There’d been conversations about this, in the Renault, of a kind to make Crowley’s orphaned heart sink under the weight of possibilities. “You’ve got a daughter. Every thought you think for the rest of your life has to start there. You hear that crying? That’s nothing. You wait till she’s fed and clean and dry and you’re trying to sleep and she starts to cry and won’t stop unless you, not Jeannette, not Hastur, not your manservant, you, walk around and around and around the room with her. The day may come when you thank God on your knees that Angel knows about her because he’ll come running if she needs him and you don’t know who else to turn to. That’s your life now, and what you’re going to tell the Foundation about it, I don’t know.”

“Foundation. Damn.” Ligur went back to the drawing room and pulled a chequebook out of the secretaire. “You need to get out there. Big meeting and you missed it. Old Mr Prince is angry at you.” He tore off the cheque and held it out. “Sorry, no cash on me. The banks have been overrun.”

Crowley took the check and folded it into his notecase. “Meeting? What about?”

“The War, what else? Everybody between 18 and 30 was there. Had to draw lots, to decide who’d volunteer to go off to be shot, show everybody a Prince Boy is a patriotic as the next lad.” Ligur’s sneer was all his own, no vestige of either Prince in it. “The Princes know it’s bollocks, but apparently it’s necessary bollocks and if some of us die that’s an acceptable business loss.”

“It won’t come to that,” said Hastur. “Parades and shouting and a scrum or two, and everybody’ll be home by Christmas so the toffs can talk about what heroes they were.”

Ligur picked up his abandoned cigarette, looking mildly surprised when it shattered, a mere tube of ash. He dropped it again, and got another out of a box on a sidetable. “All the same to me. I didn’t draw the black ball. You’re for it, though, Crowley, and I don’t know what that’s going to mean to you.”

“Why should I be for it? Where’d you tell them I was?”

“Me? I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know where you were, did I? Hadn’t been anywhere near Oxford, as my manservant can confirm. All anybody knew was, the telegram couldn’t be delivered and you didn’t report in.” He took the first puff of his new smoke, grimaced, and muttered. “Sorry.”

“Wonderful. What’re you going to report about Uriel? Do I admit I know she exists?”

“Dunno yet. I’ll think of something.” 

Uriel had stopped crying. “Isn’t your manservant a reject Prince Boy?”

Ligur shrugged. “We all get one. We all make the terms we can with them. That’s handled. You need to get to the Foundation quick as you can and butter the old man up. He doesn’t like it that his favorite was a no-show for the sacrifice.”

“Yeah, thanks for that, mate. I’ll just stick my head in and say good-bye to Jeannette and Uriel, shall I?”

“She’s not your kid, mate,” rasped Hastur. “You did your bit and you can get out.”

Ligur looked pained and tired. “Make it quick.”

Crowley made it quick, and caught another cab to take him and his grubby luggage to the familiar station hosting the train that would take him to the Foundation. It was dark before he arrived, and he was almost too tired to swagger - but he needed the swagger, needed the grin, needed every scrap of untroubled effrontery he could assemble to cover the exhaustion. Supper was over and he hadn’t eaten. Miss Dagon made him wait in the front hall. Old Mr Prince, walking tall and straight, making Mr B. look small behind him, met him on the blood-colored carpet at the foot of the stairs, silent boys lurking on the landings above, watching in dread fascination to learn what happened to someone who disappointed the Foundation.

“Good evening, sir,” said Crowley. “I came as soon as I could. What’s on?”

 Old Mr Prince regarded him with stony disapproval. Mr B stepped forward, where the light from the chandelier shone on his round, almost delicate, face, making the port wine stain on one cheek look as shocking as an open wound. “Where have you been, boy?”

“Rescue mission,” said Crowley, as if he didn’t know he was in disgrace.  “Angel got told off to pull his sister out of the south of France. Since he can’t speak French for toffee, he asked me to come along. We didn’t expect it to take so long. Germany invaded Belgium when we were halfway across the country, so we had to come out through Spain, and now a Commander of the Royal Navy owes me a nice big favor for assisting his wife. Getting through Spain without any Spanish speakers is no joke, and I don’t want to talk about those damn mountains. Mrs Hostmassif and Aziraphale are safe on their way to Lancashire to show Lord Auldmon they’re alive, and I was in town on my way to a public call box to let Miss Dagon know where I was when I ran into Ligur and he told me to get down here. So here I am. Sorry if I worried you.”

“We never worry about our boys,” said Mr B, the last word vibrating a little, almost buzzing. Crowley was not the first Prince Boy to be drilled out of a speech impediment, nor the last to have to fight its recurrence under stress, but otherwise neither Princes showed any sign of strain. “We taught them to land on their feet. Britain went to war while you were gone, Mr Crowley, and we called our boys of fighting age in. But you were gone and hadn’t told us where. You had left the country and not bothered to inform us.”

“Yes, I realized about the time I had to stop for the first troop train, that was a mistake,” said Crowley, his own speech impediment fully under control. “It won’t happen again.”

“No. It will not.” Mr B sounded bored, apart from the buzz. “The boys who arrived in a timely manner drew lots, and the five who drew the black balls have volunteered for the armed forces. The Foundation will see to it that they have commissions and positions suitable to their talents and the dignity of the Foundation for the duration of the war, however long that may be. Everyone here hopes that they will return soon and resume productive, prosperous lives. Since you had not sufficient discipline either to be here, nor to keep us informed of your whereabouts, you will proceed from here to a recruiting station, where you will volunteer and subject yourself to military discipline, with any ranks and duties the military body sees fit to assign to you, with no assistance from us until such time as they choose to release you. You will continue to report to us, and if in the course of your military career we see a task which your situation suits you to carry out, you will complete that task as usual. You will strive to distinguish yourself. When you are released from your military duties, if you still live and have not further disgraced yourself, you will resume your education for the profession the Foundation has determined will best suit you, you will receive an allowance again, and your future will once again be assured. If you do not meet our standards, or attempt to refuse our aid, at that time - the Foundation will break you, as it has made you. The cost sunk into you by the Foundation will be recovered from you - one way or another. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” said Crowley, holding himself easily, his voice light, trying to sound as if he were accepting an ordinary package-bearing commission. “That all seems straightforward enough. Do I need to turn around and take the train back to London right now, or am I allowed to sleep over tonight and proceed fresh in the morning? Seeing as how the recruiting stations are all closed for the night, and I’m not at my most prepossessing at the moment.”

“You will catch the first train in the morning.” Mr B turned away. The boys watching from above relaxed, shifted; but Crowley remained alert. He’d never been dressed down publicly before, but he knew Old Mr Prince. This was not over until he said it was over.

Old Mr Prince stood still as a statue, watching him, and Crowley stood, poised and ready, watching him back. Mr B was halfway to the door of Miss Dagon’s office, where Miss Dagon stood with her arms and mouth folded tightly closed. The boys began to slip away upstairs. Then the old man’s voice rang out, filled the hall, stopped every movement except the swing of the pendulum in the big case clock.

“This War is not a war of one people against another,” he said. “It is not in the service of any ideal, whatever the advertisers and the preachers and the orators may attempt to persuade the public. It is the wrangling of outmoded, outworn, self-interested governments over petty issues better suited to the schoolroom than to the halls of power. It may, however, prove exceptionally good for certain business interests. Not one of the high-ranking men making decisions today cares a jot for anyone or anything except his own position and wealth. They have never raised a finger for your benefit and will waste every young man in Britain without a second thought, if they think it serves their purpose. Not one boy here owes one thing to any government or polity or institution on this Earth - except for the Prince Foundation. We have raised you up, we have recognized your potential, and we have invested huge amounts of time and money to realize that potential. No matter what empty oaths you are obliged to swear, it is not to the Crown that you owe loyalty, Mr Crowley. It is not to any connections you have made among your friends. It is not to any family, or class, or institution. It is to me. I will not waste you. I will have a return on my investment from you, or I will destroy you utterly.”

Crowley waited long enough to be sure he was done speaking, and said, measuring out his breath with care, striving to put the correct amount of weight on every word: “Yes, obviously, I know that. Let me know what you require of me, and I’ll do it. I made a miscalculation in an attempt to show initiative, as I understood that was one of my qualities you consider valuable to you, and I regret the inconvenience I have caused you. You want to destroy me? Fine, I can’t stop you and won’t try. You want a war hero? Fine, I’ll give you one. Thank you for the opportunity.”

He could feel the boys on the landing, holding their breaths. Tick, said the big case clock, and Crowly breathed in; tock, and he breathed out.

Old Mr Prince laughed, dry and nearly - nearly - mirthless. “You’re welcome,” he said, sounding like he did when presiding at the tea table, nearly sincere. “Good night.” He strode past his son to the door of Miss Dagon’s office, where she stood aside to let him pass. Mr B followed him, and shut the door behind them.

Crowley looked up at the boys staring down from the landing, shifting shadows and the occasional gleam of eyes covered by spectacles. He waved at them, smiled, picked up his grip, rolled his shoulders, and sighed: “What a week, eh? Still better than swotting up Latin.” Someone laughed, nervously, not sure it was allowed. He headed upstairs to the room that he used (not his; nothing here was his, except for what lay inside his own skin), and the boys went up before him, dispersing to the rooms they used, muttering to each other.

--
As soon as the recruiting center released Crowley the next day - which was not soon; they were overwhelmed with volunteers, talking about getting in on the War now, for fear of missing it - he found a telephone and shut himself up in the booth to call Auldmon Abbey. It took some time to get through, and as he waited he invented a dozen scenarios which would result in the charges being refused, but at last he heard Mr Samuels’s voice return his greeting with all the warmth that worthy considered proper to convey toward Master Aziraphale’s particular friend. The wait to hear Aziraphale’s own voice was always too long, but hearing the normal business of Auldmon Abbey going on peacefully around the mouthpiece was reassuring; and then he heard the familiar quick light steps, the receiver picked up and: “Crowley!” Warmth and light sped along the telephone wires on the voice.

“Hallo, Angel.” Crowley leaned against the wall of the telephone booth. “Sorry not to call yesterday. I wanted to, but circumstances intervened. Tell Mickey her package is safely delivered. Ligur was smitten immediately, as is only natural. All well at your end?”

“Yes, for, for the most part.”

Crowley tensed again, a dozen possible problems running through his mind snatching up solutions. “S’matter?”

“Nothing.” The smallness of Aziraphale’s voice gave him the lie. “There, um, we aren’t going down the Thames at all this year.”

“I didn’t expect we would be. Don’t tell me nothing’s wrong. I can hear there is.”

“It’s not wrong.” Crowley could almost see those plump soft hands twisting the telephone cord. “Only, I’m going into the Army tomorrow.”

“What? No! That’s a terrible idea! What are you thinking?”

“It’s my duty, dear boy. Pater -“

“Oh, of course, him, I should have known.”

“Don’t speak of my father like that.” The voice stiffened on the other end, another tone Crowley knew well, and knew himself defeated by. “Pater’s quite correct, as I saw when he laid it out for me. I’ll have a commission in the local regiment. The local regiment needs local officers, or they won’t be looked after properly. Pater was in the Army, you know. He knows how it works, and he says that it likes to pretend it functions on rules and regulations, but all that falls apart without personal loyalty, and you can’t requisition that from the quartermaster’s office. So one of us has to go. It can’t be Bolt - he’s needed at the factories. They’re switching over to war production - Mickey’s father-in-law called him, about naval supplies. Raffles needs to complete his medical training and sign on as a doctor, if, if the war lasts long enough. Sandy’s volunteering, but - that’s not enough. He doesn’t have the, the -“

“Yes, I’ve met Sandy, you don’t have to tell me what he doesn’t have enough of!” Crowley sighed. 

“It has to be me, Crowley. You must see that.”

It was a plea, and no plea of Angel’s would go unmet. Besides, Aziraphale could no more refuse Lord Auldmon’s order than Crowley could refuse Old Mr Prince’s. “All right, I do see,” he conceded. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.” He swallowed, and swallowed again. “I’m in much the same case. Prince Foundation told me I needed to volunteer.”

“Oh. Oh, Crowley!”

“Yeah, just come from signing on.” A light rain had set in. Crowley glared at it through the window of the booth. 

“Well. I’m sure, you took the same Officer Training Courses as me at Wellborn, I’m sure -“

“Nobody’s wangling a commission for me, Angel. I’ll go where the Army sends me, at whatever rank they decide I’m worth. At the moment I’m a private. I report tomorrow morning.”

“I see. Have you spoken to Grimsby yet?”

“Not yet. At least nobody can order him to enlist. And hey, it might not be so bad. OTC was rather fun, outwitting the other team. A few weeks training, across the Channel, run around the Low Countries a bit, and back home once the politicians are done posturing at each other.”

“Pater says he doesn’t think it will work like that. He says. Crowley. He says I will have to kill people. That I mustn’t think of them as people. I must think of them as the enemy. That if I think of them that way, I’ll be able to kill them.”

“Angel. You’re not like that.”

“But I, apparently I have to be.”

“No, you don’t. Your father doesn’t know everything. I don’t know what he sees when he looks at you, but it isn’t always you. When he looks at the world, it isn’t always the real world. And this time, he’s wrong. You’ll get through what ever happens, but you’ll get through it by being you, not by trying to be who he thinks you should be.”

“I - yes. Well. We’ll both have to manage the best we can. I can’t imagine you killing anyone, either.”

Crowley could, and it made him feel sick. He’d seen a man killed once, when he was living on the streets; knifed in an alley where he’d holed up to sleep. He’d watched, frozen in his hidey hole, seeing the blood cease to pool and the body stiffen, tiptoeing past it in the frosty morning, rimed eyes watching him go. He’d never told anyone about that. He wasn’t starting now.

“I can, however,” Angel’s voice rallied, “imagine you in uniform. You’ll look very dashing.”

“I don’t think privates get to look dashing. Can picture you at a regimental ball, though. You’d be the handsomest officer there. All the ladies giggling at you from behind their fans.”

“Wearing sprigged muslin, no doubt! I’m sure regimental balls have changed since the days of Miss Austen.”

Footsteps at the other end, a change in Angel’s breathing, Lord Auldmon’s muffled voice: “Who’s that, Sunshine?”

“It’s Crowley, Pater.” His voice, directed away from the mouthpiece, was artificially bright and cheerful. “He’s enlisted.”

“Has he? Good for him! Let me speak to him.”

“I don’t want to speak to him,” said Crowley.

“Hallo, Crowley,” said Lord Auldmon. “Congratulations.”

“You shouldn’t make him do it,” said Crowley. “Look at him, for God’s sake! He’ll never make a soldier!”

“I always knew that flippancy of yours was only skin deep; that when it counted, you’d do your duty like a man.”

“What if he dies out there? Will you be able to live with yourself? Will you be able to look the Lamb in the face when you tell him you sent his brother off to kill and be killed, and oh, look, now he’s dead?”

“I’d also like to thank you for your assistance in bringing Mickey home. She admits she had greatly underestimated the difficulties, being as shocked as the rest of us about the Rape of Belgium, and that the trip would have been much harder without your help. She’s going to London soon, to stay with her mother-in-law, pending information about Commander Dick’s war posting. Perhaps you’ll have a chance to see her before you ship out.”

“You have no idea what a rotter you are, do you? They’re not chess pieces moving around for the good of your blasted estate! They’re alive! They’re your children! They’re what the Estate’s supposed to support, not the other way around!”

“You’re far too modest, as Sunshine spares no pains to tell me. When your leaves come, I hope you will consider Auldmon Abbey as a home that would be happy to welcome you.”

“Will you finally call him by his name if he comes back with blood on his hands? Or will you put ‘Sunshine’ on his tombstone?”

“But you mustn’t let us keep you. You’ll have a great deal to do in the next weeks. Good-bye, Mr Crowley, and God bless you.”

“No! No, give me back Aziraphale, you -“ But he’d already hung up.

Crowley swore and leaned his head against the cool glass, before he realized that the seal was leaking and his hat was getting wet. He called Grimsby.

Chapter Text

Then the Archangel departed, satisfied with his work; but Mary pondered his words in her heart, in doubt and confusion, for she was very young, though brave and dutiful, and had many questions. So Aziraphale, disguising himself as a maiden, came unto her and asked: “What’s the matter, dear?” 

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

Aziraphale and Magdala had a long morning.  Aziraphale made the arrangements about the release of the body from the morgue, and took her to a mortician of his acquaintance - “He has buried a couple of my pensioner tenants, who died without any discernable relations, and he is very kind” - to make decisions about caskets, funeral services, and cemeteries. When Aziraphale said: “The Family will want him at the Abbey, in the crypt beneath the old chapel,” she shook her head automatically, then remembered that Aziraphale was part of “the Family,” and asked: 
“Is that what you want?” 

“I want him to be alive again,” he replied simply. He looked all wrong, dressed in mourning, with a black bow tie instead of the habitual tartan that he claimed belonged to an obscure Highland clan that his mother’s family technically belonged to, though they were mostly Welsh. English families were confusing. “It hardly seems to be any business of mine, or the Family’s, where his body lies. He did not have any great attachment to the Estate, himself. I mention it only because they are likely to be fractious, if any other resting place is chosen, and this might be an effective peace offering - for Pater, particularly.”

“If the only way to be at peace with them is to put what they want before what I want, there is no way to be at peace with them,” said Magdala. They hated her before seeing her - it was the only reason why the oldest brother and the cousin would not have come to the flat the night before to meet her;  it was the only reason why Joshua would have left his father’s sick room in one of his blazing furies without telling his brother about her - and she was too familiar with that hatred to attempt to appease it. “I want him someplace where I can place a stone that says he was my husband, and visit it when I wish to. I live in London now. Where is a place like that in London?”

They selected everything that must be selected, signed what must be signed. She asked, without much interest: “What now?” as they stepped out into the dreary, misty street of this dreary, dirty city that had looked so bright and interesting when she had explored it with her husband.

“Now for luncheon,” he said, waving at a cab.

“Ah,” said Magdala. “With the sisters-in-law and the little children.”

The cab pulled up. “If, once you meet them, you wish to leave, we can easily do so,” Aziraphale assured her. “But I know Ruth wishes to meet you, whatever nonsense Gabriel is pulling, and Mickey is half on your side already, because she recognizes that Gabriel is being an ass. And you really must eat, my dear.”

To her surprise, the restaurant was Indian. The hostess, dressed in a sari, greeted Aziraphale by name and expressed great sympathy, first to him and then, when he introduced them as if they were meeting at a party, to Magdala. Anathema, who had been asked to serve as buffer, arrived, and they were all seated in what was clearly the house’s best table, with a pot of singularly strong tea - stronger than the coffee she’d had with her roll this morning - and menus, talking about the play, now fully cast, and how soon rehearsals should begin after the funeral. “I don’t think I want to sit in the flat and mourn,” said Magdala. “I think I will want to work. But I’m afraid - what if we are in the middle of things, and I break?”

“Then we’ll deal with that,” said Anathema. “Your understudy’s perfectly competent, if we need to give you more time. And if you can’t push through that bit in the second act, I’ll rewrite it so that it resonates less. I’m having trouble rereading it now, myself - oh. Here they are.”

Magdala turned her head toward the door as Aziraphale raised his hand to beckon. One of the women was tall, and had not hesitated to make herself taller with her heels and her hair. She was perfectly made-up and dressed in a black frock that flattered her figure without revealing much. The other was smaller, with mousy hair, the waxy paleness that so often made Englishwomen look as if they were on the verge of going into a Dickensian decline, and only the faintest trace of lipstick. Black was a bad color for her. The taller woman led the way to their table, brushing past the hostess as if not seeing her.  “An Indian restaurant on a back street? Really, Sunshine?” For the first time, hearing his sister use it, Magdala understood why Aziraphale hated his family nickname.

“Joshua loved the vindaloo here and I intend to eat a great deal of it in his honor,” said Aziraphale, rising and extending his hands to the waxy woman.

“We ate here after we took the children to the zoo last year,” she said. “They’ll be so sorry to have missed out.”

“But where are they, my dear? I thought the shopping was for the children.”

“Phaela threw a fit in Harrods, which led to Fiver throwing one to keep her company. We had to send them home with the nursery governess,” said Mickey. 

Aziraphale’s face fell, and Magdala wasn’t sure whether she was disappointed or relieved. She wanted to meet Josh’s niece and nephew, of course she did, but...if they were temperamental...maybe when she felt temperamental herself would not be the best time.  “What a shame! I was so looking forward to seeing them. I even brought a deck of cards, so I could show them a new trick I’ve learned. I should visit them more, but of course I’m the stuffy uncle. Magdala, this is Ruth, and this is Mickey. Ruth, Mickey, this is Joshua’s wife Magdala. And of course you remember Anathema.”

“Certainly,” said Ruth, smiling uncertainly first at Anathema and then at Magdala. She was frightened. Why on earth should she be frightened?

“The hell I do,” said Mickey, allowing Aziraphale to hold a chair for her without acknowledging it. “You know I can’t remember faces and she was an infant when the Lamb used to gambol about with her.” 

“You’ll find,” said Aziraphale, holding the chair for Ruth, who thanked him inaudibly, “that you’ll remember faces much better if you’ll start looking at people. I recommend the mutton curry for you, dear - the staff developed the recipe specifically for those who have never tasted a spice before.”

Magdala pressed her lips together to stifle the laugh, and noticed Ruth doing the same, though possibly not for the same reason, as she was also blinking rapidly. She clutched her handbag in her lap as if afraid it would fly away from her. “I’m so glad to finally meet you,” she said, looking Magdala full in the face. “I’ve wanted to, for over a year now. The last time I saw him, he talked about you - I’ve never heard him talk so about anyone before - when Gabriel forbade me to meet you I - well, it doesn’t matter because here we are meeting absolutely accidentally and I only wish -“ She stopped, as if she had used up all her air.

Magdala impulsively took her by the hand. It was a slim, strong hand, steady, but very cold. “I wish, too,” she said.

Everything was easy enough after that, the business of menus and ordering, Anathema and Ruth reminding each other of things, some of which Joshua had also spoken of and some of which were new. Ruth told her how Joshua had raved about her, a year ago, and Mickey remarked that nobody spoke to her about such things, and a good thing, too, for if one thing was more tedious than another it was listening to someone in love rant on and on about it. The food arrived and was very good. Magdala, like Aziraphale, had the vindaloo, which tasted slightly less like ashes than the English foods she’d been picking at since yesterday. Aziraphale arranged with the hostess to have some of the foods Ruth said the children had enjoyed here with Joshua packed up to send home to them. Mickey warned Aziraphale about someone named Froggy raking up the past to the police and he promised to deal with it. Ruth told Magdala about the Lamb - such an odd name for the thin dark passionate man she’d known! - and her children and also, with warmth and color returning to her face as she ate tikki masala, about Raffles, the vanished middle brother who she had married at the beginning of the War and lost at the end of it; whose widow she still was, it struck Magdala, far more than she was the wife of the shadowy, ominous Gabriel. With only the slightest prompting from Aziraphale, Ruth also inquired about Magdala’s own family and experience, in which she was gratifyingly interested. Mickey’s attempted interrogation of Magdala’s financial straits was handily deflected by Anathema, who corrected several misconceptions about how theatrical people made and handled money and distracted her with a discussion of the risks and benefits of financing a production, while Ruth, Magdala, and Aziraphale discussed the practical difficulties of Joshua’s plan for bringing people over from Germany, housing them, and finding them employment.

“You mustn’t take it personally that Bolt’s being an ass about you,” said Mickey eventually, over the gulub jaman they shouldn’t have had room for, but which the waitress brought them as a matter of course, because Aziraphale always had it when he ate here. “He’s as upset about the Lamb as the rest of us, plus there’s a strike on at his factories, and he just lost an investment he regarded as a sure thing. Again. So he’s lashing out and casting blame and trying to control anything he can, which is always a mistake. Sandy doesn’t help, hovering at his elbow agreeing with him, and Pater...I’m not sure Pater’s strong enough anymore to take him in hand.”

Ruth, whose pallor had softened considerably, went waxy again. 

“I would say not, since he never does it,” said Aziraphale. “But I’m also not sure that Gabriel and Uncle Matt tell him everything he needs to know. You know how Gabriel is always - excuse me, Ruth, dear, but you know it’s true better than anyone - at pains to, to preserve his more comfortable illusions. And Uncle Matt’s gatekeeping is so stringent! I haven’t even been up there since that dreadful Christmas four years ago when Pater was never well enough to see anybody and the children had to stay in the Dower House. I keep thinking I ought to make the effort, but then I mention the matter to Crowley and he talks me out of it. And then Josh finally gets in to see him, after so long, and the first thing they do is quarrel!”

“God, yes, I could have screamed, when I read that in the paper,” said Mickey. “Heaven knows they’re both stubborn as rocks, but you’d think after so long - and with Pater sick - what even is there for them to quarrel about?”

“There is no mystery there,” said Magdala. “Fathers quarrel with sons who marry Jews. And they stay quarreled. I have never even met my grandfather on my father’s half.”

“No, Pater’s not like that, even when he’s well.” Aziraphale said this as firmly as if the degree of his certainty could force it to be true. “But of course he isn't well. Ruth, dear, how bad is it with him, really?”

Even for an Englishwoman, that is too pale, Magdala thought. She shouldn’t be nursing a sick old man. She should be nursed, herself.

Ruth’s lips were white under their pale pink gloss of lipstick, and she moved them silently two or three times before she said: “It’s - very bad indeed. I’ve been, I’ve been expecting the announcement of his death every day, since I came to town. It can’t go on like this, much longer.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Mickey. “Bolt’s at his wits’ end, and he takes it out on everyone. But it’s all rot about challenging the marriage or freezing you out of the family, and even he and Sandy can’t hold out against reality forever. He can’t keep you away from the funeral and he won’t make a scene at it, so you’ll just have to be tactful and charming to everyone around him. With Sunshine sponsoring you, you’ll get the whole village and staff on your side, and then it’s just a matter of being patient and thick-skinned - what, Sunshine?”

“The funeral won’t be at the Abbey, dear.”

“We arranged it this morning,” said Magdala. “On Saturday, he will be interred in a cemetery, here in town.  And of course I hope all his family will be there. I will go to Auldmon Abbey when I am invited. Not before.”

“I should hope not,” said Anathema. “You’ve got enough to deal with, without being tactful, charming, patient, and thick-skinned all at once, especially when Mr Gabriel won’t be any of those things.”

“But -“ Mickey looked blank. “He has to go into the crypt. He -“

“My husband doesn’t have to do anything,” said Magdala, feeling how harsh her voice must be and unable to soften it. “My husband can’t do anything. He’s dead. I decide when and where and how he will be buried, and I want him in London, where I expect to spend much of the rest of my life, not in some cold tomb where I am not welcome to visit him.”

“Of course you do.” Ruth’s cheeks were suddenly flooded with color, and the hand with which she took Magdala’s was humanly warm. “Anyone would. Even Gabriel must see that, and there’s nothing he can do about it, anyway.”

“His friends will be able to attend, interring him here,” said Anathema. “Not one in ten would be able to make it all the way to Auldmon, and there’d be nowhere to put them up except the Abbey, if they did. I can see his lordship opening the place to them all, but I can’t see Dr Fell allowing it.”

“Pater won’t be able to come, though.” Mickey sounded a little lost.

Ruth shook her head, paling again. “Uncle Michael couldn’t come anyway,” she said, very softly. “He’s never going anywhere, ever again, till he’s carried to that crypt himself.”

“We - we won’t be able to keep the journalists away from a London funeral.”

“Then we’ll deal with them,” said Magdala. “I hope they will be able to report that the Fell family all came to pay their last respects to my husband. I hope they will say we are ‘united in grief.’  Because I would hate to know that all my worst fears about alienating him from his family had come true.”

--
The pile of wheat gleaned from the chaff provided by the helpful public was surprisingly, disappointingly, frustratingly small.

Several people in the village of Auldmon, who knew Joshua, waved to him as he drove through on the way to and from the Abbey, and he waved back. This was nice, but not enlightening.

A young man who occasionally worked in his father’s small garage, in a village outside of Bolton, had been closing the place up when a bloke with a beard bought a can of petrol and some putty to plug a leak in his petrol tank. Warned that it wouldn’t hold if the area around the hole wasn’t cleaned and prepared properly, he had said he understood and would be back soon to have the work done, but he needed to cobble something together in order to get the bike there to be worked on. Since his father had taken the lorry with the towing hitch out to assist a neighbor, this did seem the best course of action; and it did not occur to the young man, who had missed his tea and was meeting a young lady that evening, to offer the fellow a ride back to where he’d left the motorbike. He hadn’t seen the bloke again, and no one else had seen him at all, though he left the lights on at the garage and instructed him to go to the adjacent house and ring the bell when he was ready. He hadn’t noticed the time particularly, as he knew he was running late and had to hurry to get cleaned up.

A number of dark-colored closed cars had been on the roads between Lancashire and London that evening, and a surprising number of them had behaved in ways that could legitimately be called “shady” by people who did not recognize them as belonging to their neighborhood, but no one had recalled a number plate, or could say definitively how many people had been inside it, and not one of them had been towing anything. Several people complained of a large dark car - variously blue or black, a Bentley or a Daimler or a Rolls - tearing through their villages at an unsafe or in any case unusual rate of speed, and based on the times and locations this was almost certainly Gabriel Fell’s 1929 dark blue Bentley saloon car, with the supercharged engine, but beyond confirming his statement about how he and his cousin had gotten from Auldmon Abbey to Mrs Hostmassif’s party, this was not much use to anybody.

A fair number of people who had watched the official fireworks display from Westminster Bridge remembered a car parking at the rail on the opposite side from the one where most of them had stood to get the best view, after the display began, and that when the display was over it was gone, but so far everyone had been far too absorbed in watching the fireworks, setting off smaller fireworks of their own, and keeping warm to notice at what point it had departed, and no two people agreed on what make or model of car it was, or had paid any attention to when they had noticed it. Still, a check with the official in charge of the display confirmed that, if the murder had been committed at any point during it, including the big climax during which the sound of a shot would have been best camouflaged, a person familiar with the streets and taking advantage of the relatively low traffic, could easily have made it to Soho to drop off the motorbike afterward in the time frame indicated by Newton Pulsifer’s evidence, making the large assumption that the dark car in question had a motorbike crammed into its back seat, and sufficient tools and strong arms available to lift one in and out of it. It was less likely that the motorbike been dropped off (and gun picked up) prior to going to the bridge, but given the impossibility of finding a reliable time in the witness statements that also could not be ruled out; nor could other possible scenarios for delivery of the motorbike, if the murderer had accomplices. 

Reading summaries after lunch was sleepy work, but Frank felt cold, reading this one.  He tried to sound casual and perhaps a bit hardened as he remarked to the Inspector: “It took a cool hand to do this, if our theory of the crime is that the murderer stood, literally in the middle of a crowd of people, induced the victim to look down, shot him in the back of the head, shoved him off, and drove away, with nothing but a lot of skyrockets and Roman candles to keep anyone from hearing or seeing what he was doing - by God, what a nerve that took!”

“I expect whoever it was kept the car between them and the bulk of the possible witnesses,” said Inspector Lamb. “And of course, it’s shocking what people don’t notice that goes on around them, especially in the city, where we all mind our own business and hope our neighbors return the favor. I never really took that to heart, till I started evaluating witness statements, and it’s not the sort of thing the average layman would be confident of. Makes me think in terms of a professional.”

“But why?” Frank waved at the stack of preliminary reports on the organizations Joshua Fell was associated with. “If he’d annoyed a gang of smugglers or something, shouldn’t we have some indication of it by now?”

“It’s not only gangs that breed professional killers,” said Inspector Lamb. “What did you think of Fred Hastur?”

Frank came up short against this apparent non-sequitur. “Embarrassing relative, lacking in tact. He doesn’t have a public-school air, but Froggy sounds like another lingering school name - a pretty powerful one, if even his niece uses it. Why? Do you know him? He didn’t seem to recognize you.”

“Not what you’d call ‘knowing.’ Seem him before. Witnessing at inquests on accidents. Once noticed him fading away from the site of an accident he was never questioned about. He seems to have a peculiar affinity for fatal, or at any rate serious, accidents to respectable people with no known criminal associates. Some of these respectable people had indicated a willingness to testify on some matter, or that they had something they wanted to get off their chests, and then after the accident, if they survived, decided their chests weren’t as burdened as all that. He’s a sporting gentleman who always seems to be in funds. He’s been in for questioning more than once, but the only time there was ever anything to hold him on he had a good barrister and was found not guilty. ”

“So - you think he’s a murder-for-hire? Freelance intimidation and extortion? That casts a whole new light on Mrs Hostmassif’s household and the lovely Miss Ligur’s place in it, if so.”

“It does. But it’s like everything else in this damn case - all ifs and maybes and not quite fitting. I’ve put out some feelers in other departments, and we’ll see what turns up, but my impression is, that accidents are his specialty, and that he operates most comfortably in London. Not to say he wouldn’t drive several hours north and punch a hole in a gas tank in order to have an excuse to pick up someone he was being paid to get out of the way, but if he did that, why the devil haul his target through all that lovely isolated countryside in order to pop him off, in an undisputably murderous way, under the noses of a lot of firework gawkers? No, I don’t think, based on what we have, that he actually did it - but I think he might know more than he lets on.”

“He’s another one wants us to focus on Crowley,” Frank said. “I wonder what he meant about other mysterious deaths?”

“We’ll know all about Mr Crowley by the end of the day,” said Inspector Lamb. “A good deal more about the whole family, including Joshua’s mother’s family, and dammit, Miss Ligur and the Soho crowd and the folks running the garage outside Bolton, too, while we’re at it. This Joshua’s death must have been some good to somebody.”

Frank considered the geography of the case. “There’s no question but that the puncture in the fuel tank was deliberate. He had to have been stopped and away from his bike when that happened, and it had to have happened before he got to Bolton. Could he have witnessed anything bad enough to murder him for in that interval?”

“If he stopped and saw something and was known to have seen it, why go through all the rigamarole? Why not drop him and the motorbike into a quarry or what have you?” Inspector Lamb shook his head. “Either we’ve missed something, or somebody out there knows something they’re not telling. Too scared to, or doesn’t realize what they know.”

“The inquest’s tomorrow, isn’t it? Maybe that’ll nudge somebody to speak up, somebody that hoped they wouldn’t have to.”

“We can but hope.”

Frank sighed, put aside the pile of new reports, which were making his eyes cross, and flipped through the transcript of the previous day’s notes that the girls in the typing pool had prepared. This time, the discrepancy he’d been struggling to pin down leapt out at him, plain as a pikestaff.
--
The door of Number 5 Georgian Terrace Flats, Mayfair, was opened by a young man of an even darker complexion than Uriel, with eyes fringed by lashes that young lady might well envy. Inspector Lamb unexpectedly grinned and exclaimed: “Why, Erich, fancy seeing you here! Did the MP give you the push? Too bad!”

The young man’s face closed down to the point of sulkiness. “You are mistaken, sir,” he said coldly. “My name is Cassius Erich. You are confusing me with my brother, Boniface Erich, who serves the honourable MP from Ledshire.”

“Really? Identical twins?”

Cassius Erich sighed. “Identical triplets. Aegidius is also in service, in rather exalted circles. Is there something I can help you - gentlemen - with? Mr.Crowley is at his place of employment, this being the middle of the working day, but I will be happy to give him a message when he gets home. ”

The Inspector and Frank produced their badges. “Inspector Lamb, Scotland Yard, and Sergeant Abbot. I had the pleasure of interviewing your brother during that little matter of the smugglers operating in his master’s borough last year, so we’re practically friends, you and I. He was most - helpful. We understand that you have a Mr A.Z. Fell staying here? We are looking into his brother’s murder and would like to clear up a few points that our investigations have raised.”

“Mr Fell is resting.”  He was a small man, but then the opening he was blocking was not wide. “You should have called ahead.”

“It’s all right, Erich,” said Aziraphale, behind him. He was in shirt sleeves, dark gray waistcoat, and dark trousers. “I don’t mind. I am a little tired, but on the other hand, reading is, is a bit harder than it usually is and if I can be of some use I had better do so.” He smiled apologetically - whether at the policeman or at the manservant, Frank could not tell. “And - if I might have a little more cocoa, please? It’s so damp and gloomy today! Perhaps our guests would like some also, or some tea?”

“That’s quite all right, sir,” said Inspector Lamb, as Erich let them in, with no great enthusiasm. “We’ll try not to trouble you too long.”

The flat was very modern, all white and black with red accents, as different as could well be imagined from the cozy, personal clutter of the bookshop. No photographs, only paintings of an abstract bent that matched the decor; no books, only an assortment of magazines; no statues (if you didn’t count the nymph lamps), only some painfully tasteful and stylized ornaments. Aziraphale sat in a sleek white wing chair by a cheerful gas fire, where he had apparently been smoking an old briar pipe, reading The Strand Magazine, and drinking cocoa. A stack of untidily refolded newspapers occupied the corner of the coffee table nearest his chair. 

The obvious place for Inspector Lamb to sit was the equally sleek black wing chair opposite him, but instead he took one end of the black and white sofa, and Frank dutifully took the other, noting that Aziraphale did not look nearly as out-of-place as one might expect. His eyes were red-rimmed, but the overt distress of yesterday and the grim determination to control it had both calmed and mellowed, leaving him looking sad, tired, and kind. “Crowley will perhaps be cross that I spoke to you without him,” he said, “but if I can make things easier for you, I wish to do so. He is so very good to me, but I’m afraid he’s a little overprotective. He was all set to tell his office he would be out another day, so I wouldn’t be alone, but I knew he had more than one client to meet, and of course it’s important to submit wills for probate in a timely manner and Magdala doesn’t need any financial complications on top of everything else, so I persuaded him. And I haven’t done too badly on my own, have I, Erich? Thank you.” He smiled - a small smile, but a genuine, meltingly grateful one - as Erich gave him a plate of shortbreads and a fresh cup of cocoa, taking away the old one.

“No, indeed, sir,” said Erich, “though I’m afraid your errands tired you out. You must take care, you know. It’s my neck Mr Crowley’ll have, if he doesn’t like how he finds you when he gets home.”

“I don’t know how he’ll think you could have stopped me,” Aziraphale said. “He can rant at me all he likes. It’s good for him to not get his own way once in awhile.” He transferred his mild gaze to Inspector Lamb as Erich withdrew. “I escorted Magdala on a number of sad errands this morning, and we met Mickey, Ruth, and Miss Device for lunch. I’m pleased to say that Ruth and Maggie have taken to each other.” He looked wistful, sipped his cocoa, and unexpectedly, mildly, gently, went on the attack. “I suppose you’ve come to ask me about what Hastur said to you about Crowley this morning.”

The Inspector, to his credit, took this in stride, and Frank readied his notebook. “Have you anything to say on the matter?”

“Of course I do. I was there. So was Uriel. Hastur is... undiplomatic, and being rather coarse-natured himself, I don’t suppose he considered how Uriel might feel about it being brought up, particularly in this context. He blames Crowley bitterly, though it wasn’t his fault at all, and of course it has no relevance to the current situation.”

Inspector Lamb raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps if you began at the beginning?”

“That’s always a dangerous thing to say to me, Inspector! Crowley complains that I like to go all the way back to Eden when I try to tell a story. In this case, the beginning would be with John Ligur, and I’m not really sure where to start with him.”

“John Ligur. Miss Ligur’s - father?” A bow drawn at a venture, that, Frank thought, but Aziraphale didn’t seem to notice Lamb’s hesitation.

“Oh, she told you that? Good. Normally she refers to him as her guardian. She’s a bit sensitive about her parentage and I can’t say I blame her. It’s hard enough being black, in England, isn’t it, without also being born on the wrong side of the blanket?” Aziraphale looked past them both, apparently unaware of how alert they’d gotten. Frank remembered when they’d similarly perked up over Shadwell, and tried to temper his expectations.  “Ligur was the beneficiary of an institution called the Prince Foundation, which every year vets a number of candidates for its scholarships, educates them, and eventually employs them. The school my family attends, Wellborn Hall, takes, by charter, six new charity boys per year, but Prince Boys are the very pinnacle of charity boys, of whom much more is expected.  Ligur and Crowley were both Prince Boys. Which means that they were both intelligent, enterprising, and adaptable. It would be too much to call them friends, but the Foundation does tend to bring its boys into contact with each other and in a way, you could call them family. They felt able to call on each other for favors and so on. Crowley was one of the first people Ligur confided in about Uriel, for example. Well! Crowley and I have a goddaughter about Uriel’s age, and in the years after the War, we would invite Angie and her mother on days out, to the panto, or the zoo, that sort of thing, and we would invite Ligur and Uriel, too, so that the girls could play together.” 

Aziraphale stopped to take a sip of cocoa, allowing Frank’s notetaking to catch up. Explaining seemed to settle the man; he had begun to gesture and expand in a way that was simultaneously intent and relaxed, his eyes bright and focused on something his listeners could not see. On a witness stand, he might need some guidance, to prevent him from wandering off on tangents, but he would make a good impression on most juries.

“Now, in August 1922 - you will want to check the newspapers, I presume, to confirm my memory -  when the girls were eight and nine, Joshua took it into his head that he must learn to sail - it was about the time he dropped out of Oxford, and he was full of ideas - and that we must learn, too, and the upshot was, that Joshua and I went to Lake Windermere on holiday, with Angie, her mother Mildred, and Uriel joining us for three weeks, and Crowley and Ligur coming down on weekends. It turned out that Ligur quite enjoyed sailing, but swimming wasn’t one of the gentlemanly skills the Prince Foundation finds it necessary to train their boys in and what none of us realized until too late was, that Ligur had never, he just, he never learned it on his own.” He took a deep breath and blew it out. “So. Um. Long story short. I was at the tiller, Joshua was manning the sail, the wind went back on us, Joshua made an error, the boom swung around unexpectedly, Ligur raised his head when he should have ducked, and he went in. And he panicked. Joshua jumped in to get him out, but Ligur is, was, a much larger man than Joshua and, as I said, he was panicking, the girls were screaming, which I think made Ligur panic more because, well, his daughter was screaming, he started dragging Joshua down trying to, to climb up him, practically strangling him. So - Crowley jumped in and, and pushed Ligur off Joshua. Down, into the water.” He paused for another breath and a shortbread.

“This left Mildred and me to deal with the children, and holding the boat steady, and and so on. As soon as Mildred took control of the boat I dragged Joshua into it and started lifesaving on him, because he was not responding, at all, leaving Crowley free to dive after Ligur. But it, well, probably I should have dived in to begin with because I’m stronger, but I’m also more buoyant, but - excuse me.” He held up his hand for patience while he stilled his agitation. “I beg you will avoid mentioning this incident to Crowley. It upsets him, though the jury was unanimous in declaring the death accidental and commending both of them for their prompt action. Which, I’m afraid - Hastur regarded that as being tantamount to blaming Ligur for his own death, and that made him furious. At the jury, at the coroner, and particularly at Crowley and Josh. He’d never liked Crowley. Hastur was what we called an ordinary charity boy, and though he was very attached to Ligur, indeed I couldn’t name you a single other friend he’s ever had, he was, I’m afraid, jealous of the other Prince Boys. Particularly Crowley, I believe. When the court declared Hastur Uriel’s guardian, as specified in Ligur’s will, he took her away and wouldn’t let her see any of us anymore, not even Angie. Fortunately, since Mickey wasn’t there, he didn’t blame her, and she kept an eye on the girl.”

“Your sister was also fond of Ligur and Uriel, then?”

For some reason this seemed to rally him. “My dear sir, Mickey is not fond of people.  She is very loyal; but - well - her company is primarily bestowed on those with whom she shares interests. Ligur was a successful stockbroker and Mickey is fascinated by money. Not in the sense of being avaricious, you understand, but she has an intellectual grasp of markets and things of that nature, similar to the grasp a stockbroker needs on those topics. Also, he was a great asset at parties, and she threw - she still throws - the kinds of parties where people who have money to invest meet people who need capital. They had a very businesslike friendship. At the same time, most of Ligur’s close acquaintance was always male, and when he found himself in charge of a young girl naturally he appealed to her on occasion. Poor Hastur was at even more of a loss, I believe. I suppose, not having a daughter herself, Mickey took more of an in interest than she otherwise might have. She would never have mentioned Ligur to you, herself, since his life and death are obviously not germane to the investigation, but she did warn me that Hastur had brought the matter up and that it would be bound to make you curious. It is clearly better for me to explain than for Crowley to do so, as the subject is very distressing to him.”

“Naturally so,” said Inspector Lamb. “I appreciate your frankness on the subject. It is not, however, the subject I came here to ask about.”

“Ah,” said Aziraphale.  Color rose in his cheeks. “I see. This is the sort of thing Crowley has been warning me about, isn’t it? Answering police questions before they’re asked. Still, I don’t see the harm in telling you about it. If you’re digging into Joshua’s background, which I presume you are, you’d have found it before long in any case. What, er, what did you come here to ask me about?” He ate a shortbread, regarding the Inspector with a benignly inquiring expression.

“It was something Abbot noticed in his notes,” said the Inspector. “Go ahead, Abbot.”

“Er. Yes.” Frank had not expected to be more than a shorthand-taking ghost at this interview, and nearly fumbled the pass. “There was a discrepancy between two of the statements made to us, and though it’s not obvious how it might affect our understanding of the case, we scrutinize discrepancies on a matter of principle, because there’s often a clue hidden in the, as you might say, cracks between the facts.” He produced a verbal-examination sort of smile and Aziraphale nodded encouragingly. “On the one hand - let me find it - your brother, in remarking on your management of the Soho properties, stated: ‘I’ve had to make him raise the rents twice since the Crash.’ However, when Mrs Potts was singing your praises, she stated: ‘Mr Fell’s a very good landlord, very understanding. Lowered the rent after the Crash.’” He flipped the notebook back to the present page. “These statements can’t both be true, so we thought we’d better ask you, as the person best positioned to know.”

“I see.”  Aziraphale shifted in his chair. “I’m afraid you’re laboring under a false assumption. Both statements are true, even though one of them is also in error.”

“I don’t follow,” said Frank.

“It’s perfectly simple. Mrs Potts is the more accurate speaker, because her understanding of the situation is closest to what actually happened. But Gabriel was not being dishonest with you. He is not, you see, in position to tell me to raise the rents. I manage the Soho properties, not him. Pater controls my allowance, and my salary, and is entitled to raise or lower the demands the Estate makes on the properties each year, though since his indisposition Gabriel has acted as his proxy. Twice since 1929 he has instructed me to send a higher amount home, and I have done so. Therefore, he has assumed that I raised the rents twice, but I lowered them in 1929, and kept them low, because my tenants have been, proportionately, in much greater difficulties than the Estate has.”

“So where does the extra income the Estate receives come from?” Frank asked.

“From me,” said Aziraphale. “As I believe I mentioned yesterday, my own wants are extremely modest. I don’t believe I own a suit that’s less than ten years old. Even when I buy a rare book, the market in them is so stagnant that I almost always get a good bargain. My income from my half of the capital our grandparents left to the Lamb and me is enough to keep me comfortable. Between that, my allowance, and my nominal salary as manager, I generally have a surplus, even if I don’t sell any books at all. Which, ahem, does happen some years. Ever since I took up management of the property, I have put half of this surplus into savings, and asked Mickey’s advice on how to invest the remainder.” He smiled apologetically. “I confess I don’t understand the advice above half, but she also gives specific instructions, and those I can follow tolerably well. So I pay expenses, my own and the property’s, as I go along, and every quarter add the rents, salary, my allowance, and any dividends from investments into the same account, from which I write a cheque for whatever amount the Estate requires of me.  Or, more precisely, I employ an accountant to do all the arithmetic, at which I’m afraid I’m hopeless. After Mildred calculates the next quarter’s budget for property maintenance and my needs, I send Mickey a summary of it all. She writes back explaining my best options and I implement her advice as best I can.” He broke the skin on his cocoa with the corner of a biscuit and took a sip. “Does that clear things up for you?”

“So you reliably realize enough on your investment income every year to make up the deficit in the rents to the Estate.”

“Yes. And then some.”

“I see. Your sister must be very good with money indeed.”

“Oh, she is. Pater and Gabriel really ought to have her managing the factories. Or at least listen to her on the subject. She often bemoans the fact that by the time she gains ownership of her half of them, they’ll be so deep in the red that only draconian measures will save them. That’s why she never goes to Lancashire anymore. There’s always a row when she sees the state things are in, and Uncle Matt won’t let her in to see Pater because of it, so she says why go, to only be ignored and depressed? And here I am, talking too much again.”  

“Well, there’s no harm in it. Out of curiosity - what will happen to the Soho properties, if you die without issue?”

“Which I certainly shall. I’ll have to rewrite my will, now, won’t I? Probably I’ll divide them between Magdala and Crowley. But there’s plenty of time to decide that.”

“What if there isn’t, though? What if, oh, you walked in front of a bus tomorrow?”

“Oh! Well, in that case - they’d hire a new manager, but once Pater dies - and I’m afraid that won’t be long - if I weren’t available to inherit, it would all revert to my mother’s family. The Sturgeon-Prices. I believe to a cousin in service in India.” He looked up from the cocoa, his eyes bright and shrewd and red-rimmed. “Is the disposition of the property really likely to have been of import to the person who killed my brother? Joshua never bothered with investments, you see. He let his capital alone and lived off the income and his allowance, giving quite a lot of it away, and never, ever worried about the future. Presumably he would have started, now that he is - since he was - married, but - he hadn’t so far.”

“As you describe it, probably not,” said Lamb, “but we didn’t know that when we asked, which is why we asked. Sooner or later we’ll clear away all the irrelevant things and find the core of things that matter, but we have to pile everything in one heap, truth and lies and all sorts, before we can do it.”

“I see.” 

He does, Frank thought. So often they don’t, because they’re too sad and angry to see anything. But this fellow’s eyes are clear, even when he’s crying.

Chapter Text

So War came to Heaven, and darkness fell for the first time. All of the angels were called upon to take up arms, even those who were scholars and artists and musicians, with gentle hearts, upon whom such duty weighed full sore. Among them was the Angel Aziraphale, a Principality of the Seventh Order, a Guardian of Knowledge, the least of the Principalities. When the Archangel Michael called the Host together, this small angel wondered greatly at their purpose, and he said: “Is not this tumult dreadfully ungentlemanly, and is it truly suitable for us to smite each other, even those among us so wrong-headed as to follow Satan?” He spoke quietly, but the Archangel Gabriel heard him and was angry, saying: “Do you set your sense of what is proper against that of the higher angels and the LORD GOD?” Whereupon Aziraphale humbled himself and replied: “No, no, certainly not; only, to those of us who are lesser in might and understanding than such exalted ones as yourself, all of this brouhaha is very puzzling and unpleasant.”

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

Crowley lived through every second of the War, but afterward it became nothing but a series of disconnected scenes, vivid and painful and stinking.

Rain that never ceased to fall. Suns that never rose. Shoes that never fit. Socks that never dried. Guns that never ceased that blasted racket. Uniforms that were never clean.

He drove. Horses, cars, lorries, whatever got what he was transporting where it was supposed to go, which was not always where it needed to go. Sometimes, when he wasn’t moving guns, something fell off the back of the lorry and wound up where it actually needed to be. Sometimes it was liquor and it wound up inside his stomach and his head. Sometimes he was in a convoy and sometimes he was alone, detouring from his prescribed route to do someone a favor, to get away from the sound of guns, to avoid a nasty bit of road, to find Aziraphale.

Aziraphale was in a trench. In a different trench. In yet another trench. In the first trench again. With rats, with lice, with an ever-shifting cast of dull-eyed boys from Milltown and Auldmon, with a grimy sergeant who was always angry, with barbed wire and mud, with gas masks and guns and the sound of guns. Getting letters from home that told him how to manage himself in the old, dead actions his father had fought; writing letters home that could contain no truth; writing letters to the families of dead men. He knew the dead men. He knew the families. They were Abbey tenants, servants, Auldmon villagers, farmers and the sons of farmers, boys he had played with as children too young to worry about who owed rent to who. His curls and hands were gray with grime, but when he turned, and saw, his voice said “Crowley!” and his eyes lit up before he advanced, scolding: “Are you supposed to be here?”

Frost and darkness and someone sang: “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht. Alles schlaeft. Einsamm wacht nur das traute hochheilige Paar.” 

A football deflated slowly in No Man’s Land. Rhino used it for target practice. 

Grimsby was in a supply depot, too close to the lines. “I know,” he said, lighting Crowley’s cigarette and then his own, shielding the sparks from rain under hands in half-gloves, already splitting at the seams; “but there was nothing to import. I was the last hired and the first let go, and Mildred, well! We’re to be congratulated. I wrote you and Angel both, but I don’t suppose you got the letters.” 

Sandy smoked a cigar in an officer’s mess. He didn’t see Crowley, passing the door in the darkness, looking into the smoke and the light of camping lanterns. He showed off the notches on the hilt of a knife, a good knife. A German knife. “This first one, that’s the boche I took it off of. Next five are my share of his unit. This one -“

A horse hung in barbed wire, screaming, screaming. Its off rear haunch was gone. Crowley got as close as he could and used his gun, the first time he had used his gun since marksmanship training, and it ceased to scream. But the guns kept firing.

Gas inched along the ground, twining through the barbed wire, sinking into the mud. Gas masks made the world narrow, with a black border on all sides, like a trench that traveled with you.

It wasn’t raining for once, and the summer night was warm. Crowley sprawled alone across the bonnet of a lorry, smoking to still the tremor in his hands, and the stars began to fall, like angels, in their thousands. He looked to his right, and there was no Angel; to his left, and there was no Grimsby.

Crowley wrote to the Prince Foundation, sending lies and truth tangled together like barbed wire into the unresponsive mail bag, not knowing whether any of them reached Miss Dagon’s desk.

Grimsby paid their shot at a little table in a little cobbled street. He showed the photograph around, grinning as Crowley and Angel, Rhino and Sedgie and Fallon, plus whoever that chap was from the quartermaster’s office, exclaimed over the pale blob in the frilled cap in Mildred’s arms. “Angela Antonia,” he said. “Happen Angela’s Millie’s mum’s name, so it does double duty. She says the nose is mine but I can’t see it in this picture, can you?”

Cobbled streets. Bad roads. Impossible roads. No roads, just unplowed fields. No fields, just mud. Engines held together with baling wire. Horses dropping dead in their harness. Lying flat beneath the high carriage of a lorry as the ground shook beneath and around him and mud fountained up from brand-new craters.

Angel wasn’t supposed to be on this part of the line, but he appeared out of the rain. The young man he carried moaned in small, short, repetitive bursts. His feet, dangling in ruptured boots, were an unusual shape. “Where are the ambulances?” Angel demanded; and only when Crowley said: “I can be an ambulance” did his eyes light up with recognition.

The important thing, with lice, is to have a finetooth comb. You drag the comb through the hair - arms, head, private bits, where ever the damn things hide out - and you scrape what you get into the fire, if you have a fire, but if not you dunk the comb in water till the little wrigglers caught in the teeth stop struggling, good and drowned, and then you do it again and again and again, not caring whether the water is clean, or whether it’s water at all, because it might be benzene or liquor too bad for even a soldier to drink. You are damp and dirty anyway. You can at least be damp and dirty with fewer lice. And when you do have fire, take a spill - a cigarette will do - and singe the seams of everything, or you’ll never get all the nits.

Grimsby lies in a forest full of ghosts and guns. He stares up at the trees that let the rain through their branches onto his open eyes. He is not supposed to be here. He was never supposed to be here. Crowley fumbles beneath the branches, beneath the sound of the guns, in the pockets of his uniform, until he finds the photograph and the letter. Sandy, smiling, sits high up in a tree and aims his rifle, or perhaps that is a different forest, or a different day or night.

Bullets hurt; but then they patch you up and send you back to where the bullets are.

Crowley hears the story in a bistro. A Brit officer, smiled at by the wrong woman, was sick all over the man who struck him for it. The gendarmes had scooped them both up. Cigarettes, brandy, connections - a Prince Boy must always be making connections - at last a cell where Angel sits, glumly, in his dress uniform, looking surprisingly clean, his cheek on his fist, his face turned to the floor. “Tsk, tsk,” Crowley says. “Who the hell wears their dress uniform to go AWOL?” Angel raises his head like the sun rising, blasting him with a smile before affecting his best haughty toff manner. “I could hardly go to Paris looking like a trench rat. I have standards!” A few francs and some goodwill all around and they have crepes in a warm place where the old lady calls him Mr Ange, eliciting a happy wiggle as he tastes the crepes.  “Rhino will laugh when we tell him,” says Crowley; and Angel says, gently: “Rhino is dead. Trench fever. Last week.”

Angel wiggles beneath Crowley on coarse, almost-clean sheets in the back room of a brothel. He is too lean, too hard, calling Crowley’s heart out of his chest in compassion for everything the trenches have whittled out of this precious body. They have always made love cautiously, afraid to be caught, but now they touch each other as if their skin has been flayed away. Afterward, with exquisite, implacable gentleness, Aziraphale brings the strength out of its hiding place to pin Crowley to the bed in the dark, demanding: “Stay alive. Promise me. Stay alive. Whatever happens, whatever you have to do. Stay alive.” Crowley, breathless, promises him.

The boy hanging in the barbed wire is German. The guns have moved on, but he hangs there, his stomach split open, red loops hanging down (dark, it’s dark, how can he see red in all this darkness?) and he screams and screams, in German, begging for mercy, in German. Angel looks at Crowley imploringly. Sergeant Shadwell shouts somewhere in the darkness, taking a headcount. Crowley aims but his hands shake.  “Angel,” he says, “Angel.” Angel takes the gun from him with steady hands. “All right, dearest,” he says. “If you can’t. It’s all right.” He aims. He shoots. The screaming stops. The mud on Aziraphale’s face has clean streaks through it, where the tears run, but his hands are firm and solid, holding Crowley up. Crowley, who couldn't save him from even one dreadful duty.

There’s a promotion. There’s a medal. He doesn’t know why. He wishes he hadn’t done whatever he did to earn it. He sends the medal to the Prince Foundation.

Sometimes the Lamb writes, telling him marvelous fairy tales about impossible countries called Wellborn Hall, and Auldmon Abbey, and England.

An empty town. A bandstand. Their units are both somewhere around but only they are in the bandstand. They drink looted wine beneath the stars and try to sing the songs the band would have played before the war, but Angel’s French is still atrocious unless he’s ordering in a restaurant. His restaurant French is flawless. The sound of guns spoils Crowley’s rhythm, although there are no guns tonight. He knows that, but he still hears them. Crowley’s hands shake so that Angel has to light his cigarette for him. “Yes, but,” Crowley says, “we could go off together. Leave our identification disks and an old boot on the edge of a mortar crater, get right out.” Angel rests his head against Crowley’s shoulder. He has drunk enough that this is probably safe. “Please, dear, don’t tempt me. There’s no where to go.” Crowley twines the chain of Angel’s disk through his fingers, closes his hand until the edge of the metal bites into his palm. “S’a big world out there. Canada. Tahiti. Kenya. Mexico. Someplace, anyplace, where they won’t be shooting at us.” He swigs from the bottle and passes it to Angel, who holds it without drinking. “You must do as you see fit, but I have a duty,” he insists; as if his duty is a chain with no lock and no breaking point; as if he doesn’t know that, if he doesn’t go with Crowley, there is no point in going. He drains the bottle, wipes his mouth as fussily as if he weren’t doing it with his sleeve, takes a deep breath. “The Lamb would mourn us, dearest.”

Crowley saw young Archie Miller, the Prince Boy of the form behind him, giving orders to an artillery crew one day and in the back of an ambulance the next. He met a nice boy who was to be his backup driver, but the car overturned during his first run, and broke his neck. He met a nice boy who shared a cigarette with him, and died of typhus. He met a nice boy who got gassed, whose lungs melted. He met a nice boy who took a bullet, went to hospital, came back, took another bullet, went to another hospital, came back, got his jaw shot off, never came back from the hospital, if he even made it to the hospital. He met a nice boy who broke down, shot his own hand, called it his million-pound wound, because if your hand was spoiled you couldn’t be a soldier and had to go home. He met nice boys who died of the runs, of trench fever, of typhus, of drowning in the bottom of a trench, of inhaling gas, of drinking the liquor they made in a still cobbled together from engine parts. He met nice boys to whom he taught all the verses of “Mademoiselle from Armentieres” and how to fix an engine on the fly without the proper tools or parts, and never bothered to learn their names because another boy was always coming along behind them when they died or were invalided out or simply vanished overnight.

He never once met a man his entire time in the Army. They were all boys, and they made him feel old; or senior officers, and made him feel enraged; or sergeants. Sergeants have never been men or boys; they are only ever sergeants. Especially Angel’s sergeant, Shadwell. Shadwell is a boot as old as time itself, and a foul-mouthed bastard, and some relative of old Nanny Shadwell at Auldmon. Angel would never have told Crowley about the time the beam broke and he had to hold it up till all the boys who would have drowned in mud had gotten out, but Shadwell did. Shadwell sees witches flying above the lines before every major offensive, showing him where the artillery will hit worst. His witch sight changes the way Angel deploys his boys, and they seem to die of artillery fire at a rate slower than boys of other units do. He hangs Angel’s ever-changing ranks of men with charms. He gives Crowley a charm made of red thread and a spent bullet, which he wears around his neck with his identification disk, and never takes off, because he promised Angel he would stay alive.

One day, or night, or some damn time, a letter arrives from Mildred Grimsby. It apparently went all around the European theater first, its corners rounded with wear, Crowley’s name faded and nearly obscured by greasy fingerprints. The photographs inside are of a tiny girl with shiny straight dark hair and a face like Grimsby’s if it shrank in the wash, sitting up very straight on a low stool, held in place by a Mildred with tired eyes and a determined smile. Thank you so much for your lovely letter, and for sending us back our picture. His commanding officer wrote to us that he was brave, but I think it was the same letter he writes to everyone and I don’t care if John was brave or not. I care that he carried the picture about; I care that he showed it to everyone; and I care that you found him and thought of us. As you see, I was right about Angie having John’s nose. I tell her about him and the two of you every night, but I don’t know how much she understands. I hope you meet her one day, and you can tell her what he was like at school, and whatever you think it best for her to know about how he died. Please give one of these pictures to Angel and keep the other one yourself.  He keeps one picture and takes a slight detour, only fifty miles or so, the next time he’s out without a convoy, to take the other to Angel and sit with him in the current trench, drinking something resembling beer and talking about Grimsby, and Mildred, and Angela Antonia, and Uriel, and eventually, somehow, Gran. On the way back he does something he eventually gets a medal for, but he will never be quite sure what it was, as he is far drunker than he expected to be based on the kick of the beer or whatever it was.

Crowley drives drunk in the dark better than most men drive sober by daylight.

An ambulance is half in the ditch, the driver on her hands and knees in the mud, searching, searching. The lorries grind their way around the obstruction, mud spitting out from under their tires. Crowley parks, leaving the engine running, as the guns pound in his head and the wounded groan. “What are you looking for?” He shouts, over the sound of guns and engines, and she looks up, pale and exhausted. He knows that face but there’s no time for that. “The starter crank,” she says. “It’s gone, it’s -“ He holds up a hand. “Hang on, Doris! I’ve got you!” He pulls out the box, digs around in it - yes, this will do. He shoves the bent iron rod into the crank case, puts his back into it. It sticks. Doris puts her hands on either side of his and puts her back into it, too. “Mr Crowley?!” Crowley laughs, and cranks. “Fancy meeting you here! Get in and press the starter. Up you go!” The engine sputters, chokes, and starts again, and the ambulance lurches off. Fewer of the men in the back are groaning now. Neither he nor Doris Wingarde can help that. 

The high, distant whine of aeroplanes, their shadows marring the brightness of the first sunlight in centuries. Guns, and guns, and guns, and silence, and explosions.

Raffles-and-Ruth are somewhere about. He’s been patched up in a field hospital a time or two, but never by them. They’re alive. Angel would tell him, if they weren’t alive.

Angel was in a trench, but the trench is on fire. The trench is on fire. The trench is on fire and the other drivers on the convoy are tackling him and they won’t let him go, Angel is on fire and Crowley needs to get him out but they won’t let him go, add them all together they are stronger than him, they don’t understand how strong Angel is, how he won’t leave until all his boys are out -

He is very, very drunk. 

There is mud. There is gas. One of the grubby lenses that let him, sort of, see, pops out. His eyes burn. It doesn’t matter because Angel died in a trench on fire. 

But. 

He promised Angel, in Paris, in the back of a brothel, where they fraternized up and down the ranks, upper ranks wiggling happily below lower ranks in a mostly-clean bed, he promised to stay alive. So he scrambles in the mud, finds the lens, plugs it back into the empty hole and secures it with the putty he keeps in his pocket to seal fuel leaks, and he crawls. He burns with the gas trapped inside the mask, he can’t see, he can’t hold his breath any longer, but he crawls, and no more gas gets in.

He can’t see. He can’t hear. He is blind. He is deaf.

No. He hears a door shutting. He hears footsteps. He hears breath. He can hear, but it feels like being deaf because he can’t hear any guns.

He is dry. He can’t remember the last time he was dry. 

He is warm. How is it possible for him to be warm?

His hands vibrate. His chest hurts. He smells disinfectant. Ah.

This is a hospital. He is alive and blind in a hospital and Angel is dead and Old Mr Prince can’t destroy him anymore. He’s already destroyed.

The Sisters call him Sergeant Crowley. He can’t remember making sergeant, but he doesn’t care enough to correct them. They tell him that the damage to his lungs was superficial, that the damage to his eyes is healing, that when the bandages come off he will see again, but there will be scarring. Quite a lot of scarring, actually. He doesn’t care. 

He is allowed to get up and to sit in the day room, and he doesn’t care.

Footsteps come and go, the brisk feet of the sisters endlessly trotting back and forth, the slow heavy feet of doctors doing rounds, the shuffling of patients, and he doesn’t care. 

In the day room, different people have the same conversations. They try to talk to Crowley and he ignores them. The same gramophone records play over and over again: “The Banks of Green Willow,” “The Admiral Bogey March,” “Pack Up Your Troubles,” some violin concerto. He doesn’t care.  

He will go to England. He will not stop in London, not until he has gone up to Lancashire and walked into Auldmon Abbey, walked up to Lord Auldmon, where ever he will be. Sometimes, as he runs through this in the head, he finds the old bastard walking in the rose garden, sometimes presiding over dinner, sometimes in the drawing room or his study, sometimes alone, sometimes with an audience. Sometimes Gabe is there, sometimes Dr Fell, sometimes tenants, sometimes faceless ranks of posh people who have also sent their sons off to die in trenches while they drink tea and talk about the iniquity of The Hun. (The Hun is singing “Stille Nacht.” The Hun is hanging in barbed wire with his guts hanging out, screaming, until Angel bestows mercy upon him.  The Hun is cowering beneath the sound of the damn guns like everyone else.) It doesn’t matter where Lord Auldmon is, what he’s doing, who he’s with. The important thing is to find him. To walk up to him, watching the changes in his expression as Crowley approaches. To punch him in his stupid posh face, again and again and again, to reduce it to bloody rubble, and scream: “Are you happy with him now he’s died the way you sent him off to do?! Can you finally find it in your heart to praise him now that he’ll never hear you?!” 

He will send a note to the Prince Foundation: “To Whom It May Concern:  Leave me alone.”  He will go to London and - he will live. Somehow. Help Mildred raise Angie, if she needs the help. Find someone else who needs help, if she doesn’t. Go to prison for assaulting Lord Auldmon, probably.  He will fulfill his promise to Angel, but he won’t enjoy it. 

He won’t even enjoy breaking Lord Auldmon’s face. It’s just something he needs to do. Because Angel is dead and Lord Auldmon murdered him. Just as Old Mr Prince tried to murder Crowley, but sucks to him, Crowley is alive and he will live because he promised Angel.

He slouches in the day room, watching the red light shining through his eyelids beneath the bandages, listening to an Australian and a Scot argue about which gramophone record to play next, listening to someone learning to walk again, the sister’s feet slowed to his pace, the click of the walking frame meeting the floor, the step-shuffle of one strong leg and one weak one, the sister cooing: “You’re doing very well, sir!”

“It’s kind of you to say so,” says Angel, without much interest.

Crowley lifts his head for the first time in - days? Weeks? He has no idea. He doesn’t care.

“You are, though,” says the sister. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, because you’re thinking about how easy walking used to be, but look here, we’re all the way to the day room. That seemed impossible last week, didn’t it? Why don’t we go in and you can have a bit of a rest and listen to some music?”

“If you think it best.”

Crowley is hallucinating. He is making a fool of himself. He doesn’t care. “Angel?” That was more a croak than a word - how long since he last spoke? He clears his throat. “Angel? Is that you?” It isn’t. Of course it isn’t. Angel is dead, Angel burned to death in a trench -

“Crowley?” The click, step-shuffle stops. “Crowley! Oh my god oh my god oh my god -“ Click step-shuffle click step-shuffle click step-shuffle, toward him, unwisely fast, the sister protesting, the sweet impossible voice babbling, pouring balm over his head, over his heart, which stumbles in his chest before setting in to really beat for the first time since the trench burned. “Crowley Crowley Crowley my dear dear boy - they said you were dead! They said your unit - direct hit on the petrol supply -“

“No! The whole unit?” Crowley swears; not least because he cannot, in that moment, remember the name of anyone who would have died in that catastrophe. “Nobody told me about that. Didn’t want to depress me further, I suppose. But I promised you I wouldn’t die, and here I am. I caught a little gas, but you - Angel you were on fire! You idiot! You were on fire! Your whole trench! I tried to go in after you, bastards wouldn’t let me -“

“I wasn’t still there, you dolt!”  Dark gray blots out the red, his Angel coming between him and the sun, but he is the sun, he is all the light in the world and he burns, oh, but he burns so beautifully, a phoenix, an angel, a celestial radiance Crowley doesn’t need eyes to see. “I only heard about it afterward - what were you even doing there? It should have been crawling with Germans. We were pulled out so quickly I made them abandon the still. I suppose the alcohol must have sprayed everywhere, acted as fuel -“ the legs of the walking frame skid and the shadow drops before him, strong hands taking hold of his, too thin, too coarse with trench life, but so warm. “But then the new trench - it was an old trench, really, and I’d like a word with the people who shored it up, collapsed right on top of me in the middle of the night, if Shadwell hadn’t been awake listening for witches and rallied everyone I’d have suffocated and as it was, the broken beam fell right on me and the impact simply crushed the thigh bone. And of course I was sick on top of it all! But I’ll be right as rain in a few weeks and you - oh, my dear dear boy, your eyes -“

Crowley squeezes the hands in his. His own hands are not shaking. Steadiness is contagious. “Pfft, the bandages come off tomorrow. I’ll be able to see right enough, now there’s something around worth looking at.”

Aziraphale laughs, puffing desperate laughs, half sobs. “I’m afraid I’ll disappoint you. They had to shave me all over - the lice, you see - and it’s growing back, but it’s coming in practically white. And I haven’t had, had any appetite to speak of, since I heard - but you’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive! Suddenly I could eat a horse!”

“If that’s what you want, I’ll find you one,” says Crowley, pins and needles prickling all through his soul as the engine of life coughs and starts up again.

Chapter Text

Then Aziraphale was troubled, for what Heaven told him it was his duty to believe; yet what his eyes saw and his heart felt and his hand touched all contradicted the Archangel. He prayed upon his knees to Almighty GOD, and GOD did not answer him in any way he understood. So Aziraphale said: “There is nothing for it. I must speak to the Serpent. When it speaks, I will know what it is proper for me to believe, for in all things we must be opposed to each other. I will take it a present of that nice wine I bought the other day, and perhaps it will not mind being awakened so much.”

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

Frank waited until the doors of the Georgian Terrace Flats were firmly shut behind him before he dared look over at the Inspector and mime wiping his forehead. “Whew! Do you suppose he has any idea what he gave us, there?”

“He might,” said the Inspector. “Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, but he’s a shrewd enough customer, Mr A. Z. Fell is. I think he’s given us the key to the whole thing, though he doesn’t believe it. If he did, he’d not have waited for us to come to him, and he’d be begging us to protect Crowley from a second round of revenge. Speaking of which, we need to stop at the call box on the next corner, get someone on Crowley and Hastur. Miss Ligur and Aziraphale, too, if we can spare the manpower, though likely having one eye on Mrs Joshua and one on Crowley will cover Aziraphale well enough. We’ll look into the Sturgeon-Price angle, too, of course. Normally a monetary motive beats revenge at this level of society, but some bloke out in India won’t have the intimate knowledge of movements that this murder requires.”

“I don’t quite see Hastur, myself,” admitted Frank, starting the car. “If it’s vengeance, why wait a dozen years?”

“Oh, that stands out a mile,” said the Inspector. “For my money, Miss Ligur is in it up to her neck - the mainspring, if you like. That’s why it’s so different from other cases with Hastur in them. He’s taking direction from a different boss, one he’ll do a bit more for, in a cause he regards as his own as well. A fair bit of her alibi involves being on the telephone during the day - who’s to say she only talked to caterers and costumers? Who knows what shady connections you make, being raised by Froggy Hastur? They could have as many helpers as he has favors to call in: one person to spike the tank, another one to pick Joshua up and get him to Westminster Bridge to meet Froggy and be tossed into the Thames. Maybe even someone else to pick up the gun, and drop off the motorbike. Which is another thing that wants explaining. They could’ve left it by the side of the road up near Bolton - why not?”

“Sounds complicated.” Frank pulled up at the call box. “But that’s the problem with every theory of the crime. The facts are too complicated.”

“At least a joint operation is less convoluted than someone going all the way to Lancashire just to bring the victim back to London. And it requires at least one more person in on it, which means a weak point. Somebody less invested than the principles are. All we have to do is turn him up, and the whole thing’ll unravel.”

Frank turned matters over in his head as the Inspector made his call. He didn’t care for it. But why didn’t he care for it, was the question? Because Miss Ligur was beautiful? He wasn’t as big a juggins as that, was he? No, it was the same thing that bothered him with every theory of the crime he tried to put together - timing. 

Grant that Uriel Ligur and her shady Uncle Froggy resented Joshua Fell’s life and blamed him for John Ligur’s death; grant that behind those cool dark eyes lurked a soul marinated in a hatred that could not be acted upon until she gained years and experience enough to plot a murder. What was the hurry, now? She must have conceived the plot in haste, having only learned on Sunday that Joshua was in town and planning a trip to Lancashire - why not wait a little? And why kill him on Westminster Bridge? Making sure he ended up in the water somewhere made sense, given the premised motive, but why shoot him - and with Aziraphale’s gun - when Hastur (if he was everything the Inspector thought him) was so good at causing accidents? An apparent accident would be safer, and more thematically appropriate, too. Oh, now he was thinking of murder as if it were a work of art. Who did he think he was, de Quincy? All the same...

“That’s sorted, then,” said the Inspector, as he opened the door. “If Froggy comes after Crowley he’ll be safe enough. The chief’s not inclined to watch Miss Ligur or Aziraphale - not enough manpower, not a strong enough motive to fear for Aziraphale, especially when there’s already so many eyes in his vicinity, and Miss Ligur’s unlikely to cause mayhem except through her guardian. We’ll ask her to step along to the Yard to assist us a bit more, though.”

“So how would Hastur and Miss Ligur know about the gun?” Frank asked, starting for the Yard.

“She’s worked for Mrs Hostmassif for two years, and known her and Aziraphale for longer than that. Children are smarter than adults think they are. They pick things up. Or she may have overheard any number of conversations. You get a lot of miscellaneous knowledge, in a confidential service position. That’s why they’re confidential.”

“But why would she or Hastur want the gun? I can’t see any reason for shooting him at all.”

“Early days to see clear to the end, yet. Just because we’ve finally got a motive doesn’t mean we have enough information for an arrest, only that we have a promising direction to look in. And - if I’m right - whatever the plan is, it’s only half done. Joshua knocked Ligur off the boat, but Crowley chose to save Joshua instead of Ligur. If they want revenge on one, stands to reason they want revenge on the other. So I’m wondering, was the plan to tackle him directly, or to frame him? Aziraphale’s gun is an odd thing for anybody else to use in this murder, but taking it’s the natural thing if Crowley needs a gun. We find that gun on anybody in the case, with any sign of it having been recently fired, we can be reasonably expected to conclude that it’s the murder weapon and the holder is the murderer, though we can’t prove it one way or another without the bullet. If the body’d gone into the river like it was supposed to, we’d have a disappearance on our hands and they’d have all the time they needed to set up a trail of clues leading to their second target. If that was the plan, they’re scrambling now, and likely to make mistakes. Our job is to be in position to catch the mistakes as they happen.”

“And if that wasn’t the plan and we still don’t have the motive? Or it’s the Indian cousin hoping for Soho real estate?”

“Then that’ll come out, too. Cheer up, Abbot! I know, you want to have all the information on everybody, sift it to the bottom, and fit things together nice and neat. You want to make sense of the crime. But we won’t find all the information on everybody because it can’t be done and anyway we haven’t the manpower. The longer you do this, the more you’ll find that if you’ve got an act of violence, and a violent person with a motive to commit it, that’s the angle to concentrate on, because the faster you can bring a case against them, the less time they have to be violent to somebody else.”

Frank saw the sense in that; but it didn’t make him feel any more satisfied.

--
Ruth had the cab drop her at the tobacconist’s on the corner, so that she could pick up cigarettes for herself, cigars for Bolt and Sandy, and peppermint bullseyes for the children, and from there it was closer to come in the back way. She’d had the shops send over her packages from the morning’s shopping, so she was not overburdened, and these purchases, with the box from the restaurant, were in no way troublesome or odd. She dropped off the food in the kitchen and told the cook to reheat it for the children’s supper, that it was a surprise. The cook sniffed the foreign spices with a suspicious face, but said “yes ma’am” without enthusiasm. Ruth slipped through the kitchen door into the dining room and thence to the hall. She wasn’t sneaking, at all, only walking quietly, as quietly as possible on the parquet. Perhaps she should take her shoes off. This was, after all, a house of mourning and there was no need to disturb - 

“Ruth! There you are!” The hearty voice jolted her into the newel post as if it had been a blow. Gabriel seemed to appear from nowhere, all the air in the hall rushing out before him. “I was beginning to wonder if I’d missed you coming back in!”

She made a smile, her Gabriel smile, a kind of perfunctory spasm of her facial muscles, which did not feel at all like the smiles she had used to exchange with Raffles. She always felt guilty, making it, because it was not a proper wife-to-husband smile, but Bolt never seemed to notice. “We lingered over lunch, and then shopped a little more,” she said. “Oh! And I picked up some more cigars for you. You and Sandy have been plowing through them, rather.” She thrust the box toward him, and he took them.

“Yeah, I guess we have, but can you blame us?” He accepted the box offhandedly, but that was all right. She had long ago learned not to expect her husband to think of thanking her. He wasn’t like Raffles, who had thanked her even for cleaning up the bloody sputum when he was coughing out his life and could barely speak. “Terrible, terrible times. But we’ll get through them, hey?”

“Of course we will,” said Ruth. “Did the packages I sent ahead arrive all right?”

“Sure they did.” (He has no idea, thought Ruth, but they probably did.) “You and Mickey have a nice outing after you ditched the kids? Too bad they decided to be naughty. I’m surprised Mickey couldn’t straighten them out. She’s got a firm hand with a kid. You could learn from her. But I guess everybody was upset. Probably it was too ambitious to take them.  But it did you good, right? You don’t look quite so pale and drippy. I see you’ve already got your black on.”

She’d had black on when she left. It didn’t become her at all, but she had plenty of black clothing. She kept it on hand, knowing that she would need it, continually surprised that she did not yet. But there had been no point in laying in a stock for children who grew out of their clothes in a month. “Yes,” she said. “It was very thoughtful of Mickey to ask us.” She felt like a liar, truth clogged in the back of her throat; but silence wasn’t a lie. By his own standards, silence was not a lie at all.

“Thoughtful, yeah, that’s our Mickey. Things are bad but we can’t sink under our troubles! You need to call on some of that spirit you used to have during the War. Things were bad then, too, but you came through. We all came through.”

Raffles didn’t, she thought, but did not say. You saw me all of three times during the War. You have no idea how bad it was. You have no idea whether I sank or swam. I’ve been drowned for nearly twenty years now, and you still haven’t noticed.

“And we’ll all come through this time, too, you’ll see. Got to buck up and stick it out. Stiff upper lip and so on. Set a good example for the kids. Show ‘em how to keep the side up. Which. I was thinking. Sandy and I need to stick around until the body’s released, tomorrow or the next day, so we can make arrangements, but you should head on back to the Abbey right after the inquest.”

She shook her head before she realized it. “Whatever for?”

“C’mon, it’s not fair to leave your mum and Jane with all the work! It looks bad, leaving them to mind the sickroom without you for so long.”

Ruth felt her face heat up. “You know as well as I do, my being there or not makes no difference.”

“What are you talking about? It makes all the difference in the world!” Gabriel laid his hand on her shoulder. He was a big man; his hand weighed a lot. “The house needs its mistress and Uncle Matt needs his best nurse! No offense to your mum, but she’s getting a bit past it.”

Truth rose like bile in the back of her throat. She swallowed down the chief part of it, unable to keep a little from leaking out. She couldn’t go back. Not now.  “I’m not Auldmon Abbey’s mistress. I’m not necessary up there, and I won’t leave the children in the state they’re in. I’m of most use here, with them.”

“Miss Volumble looks after the kids just fine. There’s not really anything you can do for them, except set the example. Duty first!”

“Miss Volumble fills their ears with gossip and ghost stories,” said Ruth, allowing herself to sound a tad waspish. “I was up half the night last night, persuading Phaela Uncle Josh wouldn’t haunt us. I can’t prove it, but I’m sure she was the one who set Phaela off in Harrod’s. Not on purpose, she’s not cruel, but if Mickey hadn’t talked me out of it I’d have dismissed her and brought them home myself.”

Gabriel looked surprised. “Really? That’s not acceptable. Why didn’t you ever tell me about this stuff before?”

“I did!” Damn! She barely had time to regret the slip before he started shaking his head.

“No, no you didn’t. You should have. How can I manage the household if you don’t keep me informed?”

In for a penny, in for a pound. “Managing the household’s supposed to be my job, but when I told you I wanted to look for another governess -“

“You never told me any such thing.”

“Yes, I did! In August. You said we’d never find anybody else at the same rate of pay and you’d talk to her.”

“I think I’d remember that if it had happened. You must have planned to say it and done that thing where you play out the whole conversation in your head the way you think it will go, and then you remember doing it when you didn’t. It’s not fair to blame me for what imaginary me says in your head.”

“I -“ Did she do that? She had never used to do things like that. She forgot things a lot, these days, repeating things she’d already said, realizing that she had no idea what she’d done with something she needed and knew she had been holding five minutes before. And...even if her memory was the correct one, he would never concede. “It hardly matters now,” she said. “Now that you know and we agree, I’ll put an advertisement in the paper and give her notice. Which means I’ll have to stay in town long enough to hire -“

“No. Take the children back to the Abbey with you and get a village girl to look after them until you can find a really first-class governess.”

“They don’t like the Abbey.” And neither would any governess worth her salt. Nor could they have a governess at the Abbey, not under the circumstances.

“Nonsense! The Abbey’s a paradise for kids, all those rooms, all that fresh air -“

“That was when we were children. It’s not like that now. Not since - well. You know.”  She took a deep breath, tasting truth and tears and a thousand sun-flecked memories, of Raffles and the Lamb and walking through life saying whatever weightless words came into her head, spilling them out into the ears around her, which would hear and remember them. “Bolt,” she said. “We can’t go on like this. Don’t you think it’s time -?”

“Time to what?” His face was blank, but the violet eyes warned her.

“You know what.”

“No. I don’t.” He did.

She sighed. “To, just, to say it. No one will be surprised. No one will wonder about it. You, you did almost promise - that we would, this year, it’d be over, we’d just - stop.”

“No, I didn’t,” he said. “I told you, if - if! - that stock performed as expected, it would be time. But it didn’t do what it was supposed to do, so now - this other venture will come in and then, we can talk about that.”

“Didn’t do what it’s supposed to?” Ruth didn’t know what made her angrier; that he’d put it like that, or that she’d expected any different. “Stocks aren’t under an obligation to do what you expect them to do! And even if they - even if you swallowed your pride -“

“Excuse me?”

“- and consulted Mickey and got a really good return - it’s gone on too long. You have to see that. Whatever the consequences, it’s time to be done.”

“That’s not your call.”

“Everything all right?” 

Ruth jumped and turned, unable to suppress a squeak. Sandy smiled, the gold fillings he’d gotten after the damage to his face during the War improbably bright in the dimness of the hall. How did he walk so quietly, as heavy as he was, in those hard-soled shoes? “Ruth’s trip out didn’t do her as much good as we’d hoped,” said Gabriel, in the same easy, hearty tone in which he said everything else. “She’s almost as nervy as Phaela. Second-guessing things. Losing sight of the long view.”

Ruth turned back to him, scraping the fragments of her courage together. He was an ass, but he was also her husband. She’d known him most of her life. She’d had children with him. It was stupid of her to need courage here. She’d never liked having her back to Sandalphon, not since that first day, when he’d poured cold water down her back in the nursery, but what - they wouldn’t - there was nothing to be afraid of. “We’re past the long view,” she said. “Every day that passes, let alone every year, makes everything harder.” It’s failed. Your plan has failed and you keep doubling down on it, like a gambler betting away his inheritance. Admit it, before you ruin everything past recall.

“Oh, that,” said Sandy, and she didn’t need to see him to know he had on the smile she hated most.  “Don’t you worry your head about that, little sis. That’s not your job.”

“You don’t seem to understand that if we stop too soon the whole thing is pointless,” said Gabriel. “Losing our nerve now would have repercussions for the rest of our lives - and past it. You don’t want our little Fiver inheriting an insolvent estate!”

“Looking after the children, ensuring there’s someone to inherit, that’s your job,” said Sandalphon.

Ruth steeled herself to brush past him and step up onto the bottom stair, getting into a position from which she could see them both at once. He did not give way for her. “All right. It was only a remark. I’ll just go check on how they’re doing and give Miss Volumble her notice.”

“That’ll keep a minute,” said Gabriel. “You haven’t been discussing this business with Mickey, have you?”

“No, we - we talked about, about Joshua mostly.” With Aziraphale and Magdala and the Device girl, who she couldn’t help thinking of as “little Anathema,” but that truth must stay firmly lodged in the back of her throat. “Remembering. And, and wondering, why he didn’t - what the quarrel with your father could be about -“

“You were talking about that?“ Sandy was right behind her now, a meaty hand closing on her elbow.

“I didn’t, they - I mean -“

“They? Who’s they?” Gabriel loomed above her even though she had made it up one stair.

Blast and damn her too-honest mouth! “Mickey and - and - we ran into Sunshine. By accident. At lunch.” She stepped backward up to the next step, but had to stop there. If she didn’t stop there, Sandy would tighten his grip and he was already holding her elbow too tightly for comfort.

“Ran into Sunshine.” Sandy’s voice had gone flat.

“Ran into him,” said Gabriel, not altering his tone at all, because he never altered his tone, never, most even-keeled person on the planet, Gabriel. How odd, that this had been one of the things that had been put forward as a virtue in him, when Dr Fell (she had never, ever called him her father) and Uncle Michael had persuaded her to accept this match, for the good of the family. “Just happened to run into him. For lunch. Was anybody with him?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Ruth. “And anyway, anyway, you haven’t given her a chance, you haven’t even met her. She’s nice and she’s heartbroken and she loved the Lamb -“

“Good old Ruth,” said Gabriel. “Always ready to think the best of people. Even people who lure idealistic little Lambs into acting against the best interests of their families. I’m not surprised she’s pulled the wool over Sunshine’s eyes. His eyes are permanently wooly, anyhow. I’m a little shocked that Mickey’d sit down at the same table with someone who may well have murdered her baby brother, but that’s hardly your fault. But you, Ruth - you knew I didn’t want you to meet her. I told you that last night. She’s not really your sister-in-law and she won’t inherit a shilling and that’s all you need to know about her.”

“I was a a a a little trapped,” said Ruth, breathlessly, trying to remember some of the things Aziraphale had told her about How to Lie to Gabriel, but her mind was strangled by the grip on her elbow. “What was I supposed to do, make a scene in the restaurant? And shouldn’t, um, shouldn’t somebody keep an eye on Sunshine?”

“Somebody should. But you didn’t.” Sandy’s voice had gone all low and soft. “You’re not much good at looking after the weaker members of the family, are you? Not since poor old Raffles. I wonder sometimes if you’re really up to looking after the children. This business in Harrod’s makes me wonder harder. They’re old enough to go to that prep school I sent mine to when Jane couldn’t manage. You should consider it.”

Ruth felt sick.

“Oh, now, there’s no need to go that far,” said Gabriel, her cheery rescuer. “Ruth’s taking the children up to the Abbey tomorrow after the inquest, and everything’ll be fine. Don’t worry about giving Miss Volumble the boot, hon. I’ll take care of that. You go on up and get some rest.  Don’t worry about anything. Sandy and I are on top of it all.”

Sandy let go of her elbow and she fled, as slowly as she could bear to, because she mustn’t seem to be fleeing, up the stairs.  All the way up, to the nursery, where a subdued and exhausted Gabriel V and Raphaela were desultorily playing Authors and Miss Volumble was mending knickerbockers and talking about what happened to naughty children who threw tantrums in public. When the children saw her they both dropped their cards and ran to say they were sorry. She hugged them tight, one in each arm. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I know you didn’t do it on purpose. We’ll take more care and not let it happen again.”

Fiver, at eight, was thin and solemn; Phaela, at ten, had a larger build, but more nerves, and though she had violet eyes they were more like violets and less like unforgiving amethysts. They took the news that they would be leaving town tomorrow and needed to pack with varying degrees of dismay. Ruth decided not to tell them, yet, that they had missed lunch with their aunts and uncle, and managed to keep herself together long enough to reassure them about the trip and promise to eat supper in the nursery with them - “I’ve told cook to make a special supper for you, to make up for not getting to have it in town.” Then she retreated to her own room, locked both the hall door and the one to the dressing room joining her chamber to Gabriel’s, and smoked three cigarettes in rapid succession while reading the post that the footman (they did not need a footman in this house, but Gabriel wouldn’t hear of letting him go) had left on her vanity for her. Most of them were sympathy letters, some from people she hadn’t seen in a long time. One, from Deirdre, with whom she and Mickey had gone to school, who had been one of the witnesses of her registry office wedding to Raffles, she read through quickly once, then more slowly after she had gotten through the pile, and then one paragraph of it once more, while the third cigarette burned down to her fingers.

I hope the police will be up to it, but there’s no good way for a murder investigation to end, is there? And the strain on you will be enormous. You may remember I had a little mystery in my own family awhile back and this is much worse than that was. Until you experience it, it’s hard to imagine how purely wretched it is, living from day to day, with uncertainty about what you know, or think you know, or are afraid that you know. So I will tell you what I did, and that is, I hired a detective! Not one of those horrid creeping men who go poking around after adulterers, but a very respectable lady who used to be a governess, named Miss Silver. And it was the wisest thing I ever did! She got to the bottom of the whole thing practically without leaving her chair, just from getting me to tell everything I knew in an orderly way, and listening, and asking questions. I understand if she has to detect she does it very unobtrusively, too, because she looks so harmless, but in any case she’s marvelous. Even talking to her made me feel better, and then she wrapped up weeks of anxiety in an afternoon. So I thought I would mention her to you, because I know you must be in a terrible state, and Bolt won’t be any good to you. If nothing else I’m sure she’d give you good advice.

Ruth, who slit her letters open across the top, checked the flap of the envelope. No one had opened it and then stuck it down again. (She knew what that looked like, now. She hadn’t when she remarried.) Too many routine condolence letters for them to bother with, with so much else on their minds. Good. Gabriel wouldn’t start discouraging her from corresponding with Deirdre specifically. (He didn’t much care for any of her friends and she already had little enough contact with them, without his actively taking against one.) Hiring a detective would be needlessly melodramatic, but she did not hate to find someone attempting to express real sympathy and dispense real advice, rather than platitudes. She remembered Deirdre’s problem, and couldn’t recall any mention of a private detective in the newspaper accounts and gossip; which spoke well for the woman’s discretion.

If only her problem were one that could be cleared up with a few discreet enquiries!

She lit another cigarette, and read the letter again.

--
When Uriel came into Inspector Lamb’s office, she brought a man  with a highly respectable face in a highly respectable suit with her. “Ivo Kermatin, of Prince and Prince, Solicitors,” he said, in a highly respectable voice. “I’m here to oversee the interests of my client, Miss Uriel Ligur, who I will remind you is not yet 21.”

“Very proper,” said Inspector Lamb, not looking particularly pleased. “Sorry to inconvenience you both, but we have a lot of work to do wading through reports and can’t go around from pillar to post constantly. Make yourselves comfortable.” He waited until Miss Ligur was seated in the rather hard office chair opposite his desk, and Mr Kermatin posted himself beside her. Frank made himself as comfortable as he could, notebook at the ready, leaning against the filing cabinet. “We were just wondering, Miss Ligur, why you lied to us about your acquaintance with Joshua Fell?”

“Because at the time I answered you, I did not know how serious the matter you were calling about was,” said Miss Ligur, as calmly as if he’d asked her what she’d had for breakfast, “and because it was very nearly not a lie at all.”

Frank pretended to look back in his notes, though he had both statements fresh in his mind. “Yesterday you told us you didn’t suppose you’d exchanged more than a dozen word with him on the telephone, and today - well after you were apprised of the seriousness of the matter - you stated that you had never met him. Yet, as a child, you went on holiday in a group that included him, and he and you were both present at the accident that befell your father, John Ligur.”

“Excuse me,” said Mr Kermatin, “who told you that John Ligur was her father, rather than her guardian?”

“Information received, sir,” said Lamb, imperturbably. “We don’t blame her for concealing that. We never asked her and have no reason to care. But this business of knowing or not knowing the victim in a murder case - we have no choice but to look into it.”

Miss Ligur sighed. She looked different in this context, smaller and less confident, despite having dressed and made herself up to look her not-inconsiderable best. “I understand that. I suppose it was foolish of me. I don’t expect you’ll believe me, but at the time I made those statements, they felt like the truth. Because since coming to work for Mrs Hostmassif, I have only ever spoken to her youngest brother on the telephone; and I don’t remember him from earlier, at all.”

“You must admit, that is a little hard to believe,” said Inspector Lamb. “I would expect the events of that day to be difficult to forget.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.” Miss Ligur looked Inspector Lamb in the face, resolutely. “I only have one memory of that entire holiday. I know, because I’ve been told, that Joshua Fell was handling the sails when my father went overboard. That the accident was arguably his fault. I know, because I’ve been told, that Joshua jumped in after Papa, and had to be pulled out himself, half drowned. But all I remember, is someone pulling me back from the water, while Crawly pushed Papa deeper in. I’m told that this was an accidental side effect of freeing Joshua from his grip, I know that my father panicked and nearly drowned his rescuer, but there’s no one else in that memory at all. Just hands pulling me back, and Crawly pushing, and Papa, sinking down out of sight.”

“And very sorry we are to make you recall that again.” Lamb did in fact sound sorry. Frank certainly felt that way. But sympathy couldn’t be allowed to get in the way of getting at the truth. “So you never blamed Joshua Fell for your father’s death?”

She shook her head. “Oh, no. I blamed Crawly. I still do.”

“Now, Miss Ligur,” said Mr Kermatin. “You know that the incident was thoroughly investigated and Mr Crowley cleared of any fault or wrongdoing. He was even commended for his repeated attempts to reach your father long after death must have occurred.”

“I’ve been told that, yes. I’m afraid that sort of knowledge doesn’t mean much, in the face of the memory. Even though, again, I know the memory isn’t accurate. Not only does it not have Joshua Fell in it, but it was the only time I’ve ever seen Crawly without his dark glasses, which I suppose came off in the water, and my memory of his face is absurd. I recall it being scaley, with huge yellow slit-pupiled eyes, like a snake’s. My adult brain tells me that can’t be true and therefore the rest of it may not be true, either - but the memory is there, all the same.”

“My colleague Mr Crowley’s eyes were badly injured, during the war,” Mr Kermatin explained. “He has extensive scarring. For a young girl in such traumatic circumstances to imagine them to have some monstrous quality does not strike me as surprising; nor is the absence of secondary figures from her memory.  I put it to you that what you have characterized as her lying to you about her acquaintance with the deceased was, in fact, a perfectly natural slip.”

“So it would seem. Mr Crowley is also a solicitor for Prince and Prince, I believe?”

“He is. A highly valued one. Mr John Ligur and Mr Joshua Fell were both his clients, though Mr Hastur, on receiving his guardianship, asked that Miss Ligur’s affairs be reassigned, a request which Mr Crowley did not protest.” Mr Kermatin’s expression became even more intensely respectable, which was a feat. “If anyone has indicated to you that he has handled anyone’s interests improperly, I assure you, the accusation is baseless.”

“Glad to hear it. Miss Ligur, do you have any suggestion why your present guardian, Mr Frederick Hastur, mentioned your father’s accident to us as ‘a mysterious death’ in which Mr Crowley was involved?”

Miss Ligur looked at Mr Kermatin imploringly. “You are under no obligation to speculate as to anyone else’s mind,” that worthy informed her. “If they believe Mr Hastur has any useful information to impart, I will be happy to accompany him here, too.”

“If he’s called in he’ll waste hours of police time, though,” sighed Miss Ligur. “And it’s not really speculation. You know as well as I do, he’s got a bee in his bonnet about Craw - Mr Crowley. It would suit Uncle Froggy down to the ground, for him to be arrested for murder. And I’m afraid he did blame both Crowley and Joshua for the accident, since they seem to be digging for grudges. But it doesn’t mean anything. If he’d been going to do anything awful he’d have done it years ago. He was only talking from spite this morning, Inspector. He's been a second father to me and I don't want to say anything against him, but - you can’t take more than half of anything he says seriously.”

“I see. Are you aware of how your guardian makes his living, Miss Ligur?”

“May I ask how the question is relevant to the matter in hand, Inspector?” Mr Kermatin cut her off before she could open her mouth, even if she would have.

“Well, you see, sir, it’s something we ask ourselves every time Mr Hastur appears in the witness box, or in the vicinity of some accident, or on the edges of some case. I daresay he’s a perfectly respectable gentleman, but most respectable gentlemen in London don’t come to the attention of the police once in thirty years, and Mr Hastur pops up significantly more often than that. And here he is again. It renders us curious about him.”

Miss Ligur’s mouth was a thin line at the beginning of this speech; by the end of it she was on her feet. “My guardian,” she said, “was left a competence by my father, who valued his friendship highly; he is very good a picking a winner in any sporting event on which it is legal to gamble; and he has been unjustifiably annoyed by the police on a number of occasions, without ever having been found to have done anything wrong. So if you are quite done asking questions about your current investigation -“

“Was that wise?” Frank asked, when the pair had left. “She’ll call him the moment she gets home.”

“If you want ‘em to make mistakes under pressure, you’ve got to keep the pressure on,” Lamb assured him. 

--
The telephone rang in the Device apartment while Anathema and Magdala were preparing tea, to be consumed in conjunction with various delicacies Mrs Potts had dropped by on behalf of various neighbors. Anathema answered and Magdala watched and listened, in tense expectation of she hardly knew what. When the exchange told Anathema that she had a call from Mary Hodges she smiled reassuringly and accepted the call. “Hello, Mary! What’s on?”

“I’ve been fired!” Her cousin was clearly fuming. “I answered a few questions of a lady that came round from the paper, and now I’ve got the sack! For telling the truth, and not even all the truth I could tell, or should for that matter!”

“Since you needed the job, that’s terrible,” said Anathema, choosing her words carefully so as not to increase Magdala’s anxiety. “But on the other hand, you haven’t been happy there in a long time. What are you going to do now?”

“About the job, I don’t know,” she said, “but I have enough money for a ticket to go to London and I thought I’d better get you to tell me how, once I get there, I should go about telling Master Aziraphale to his face what I should have told him this summer, and beg his pardon.”

Chapter Text

For are you not my boon companion? Did you not bear me up in the flood, when my strength failed me? Did I not warm you in my bosom during the first snow? Have you not, always, encouraged my hopes, comforted my fears, and borne with my foolishness? Have we not laughed together, and together, have we not wept? Have we not shared alike in evil and in good, in folly and in wisdom? Were you not there in the beginning, and would we not both move Heaven, Hell, and Earth to be together in the end? Therefore do not talk nonsense, but let me heal you and we will say no more about it.

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

Neither Crowley nor Aziraphale had a million-pound wound, but both of them took long enough to heal that they missed the Meusse-Argon offensive; and by the time they were clear for active duty the Influenza and the Armistice had thrown the entire world into confusion. They had both had a touch of flu in the spring, which seemed to grant them some immunity now; or perhaps the hospital had rested and fed them up well enough to resist infection; at any rate, they found themselves acting semi-officially as support staff at the hospital, rather than having new places found for them as the tattered shreds of their old units were dissolved into other military entities being patched up with the remnants of dead regiments. Having been students when they enlisted, they had no claim on any profession necessary to the economy, and should have been among the last to be demobbed; but one way or another, they managed to return to Britain on a hospital ship in January, alongside Ruth, and Raffles’s coffin.

The War had changed all of them, one way and another. Aziraphale had not exaggerated that his hair had grown back in almost white, and the hardships of life in the trenches had whittled him down till he was almost nothing but bone, skin, and musculature, with no comfortable cushion of fat. He could hardly bear to let even Crowley and the nurses see him, and covered up everything with uniforms and nightshirts that hung loose on him. 

Crowley’s body behaved more reasonably, regaining his (never very impressive) flesh and strength at a normal rate. Years of driving in adverse conditions hadn’t done his hips any favors, but a sympathetic doctor staved off the problem he’d begun to have with piles, so that was a good thing. His lungs were barely affected by the gas, thanks to his holding his breath in time, and his eyes recovered to usability, as promised, though the world would never be as vivid for him again and he now had a tendency to headaches if exposed too steadily or too long to light. Aziraphale assured him that the scarring was not that bad, and the doctors agreed to the extent that they did not recommend him to the experimental surgery unit that was having some success in grafting skin from unscarred portions of the body onto those that had been hopelessly marred; but he got tired of seeing people wince and look away, or wince and pretend that they hadn’t, and kept his dark glasses on before strangers.

They did not know Ruth when they first saw her.

She wore her nurse’s uniform like a second skin, as thin and faded as it was, her hair nearly hidden under her starched cap, her eyes fixed always on something - or someone - far away and receding fast. She did her duties with a mechanical smile and visible effort, the energy and engagement that had seemed so boundless as Raffles-and-Ruth taught lifesaving at The Pond, or traded off carrying the First Aid kit on hikes, or conducted chemical experiments in the schoolroom, all drained out of her. She had lost no weight, had somehow never caught the flu, had never once been wounded; but she had lost half herself, and the hand with the wedding ring and the sapphire on it hung limp and heavy by her side when she wasn’t using it. When Aziraphale said her name, she didn’t seem to hear at first, then turned with no sign of recognition and said: “Yes, sir?” 

Aziraphale stepped toward her, holding out his hands. “Oh, Ruth,” he said. “I didn’t know you’d be on this ship. Is, is he here, too?”

“Sunshine?” She took the hands offered to her, but this seemed to have nothing to do with her face. She was not a person; she was an assemblage of parts held together by a uniform - face separate from hands, bosom separate from feet, eyes separate from anything. “He’s in the hold. I’m sorry. I haven’t been answering letters - I haven’t -“ Her eyes darted around the room - “Oh, Crowley’s here, too. You’re both - here. I’m, I’m so gl-glad -“

They crumbled together and held onto each other. Crowley steered them gently into the nearest unoccupied bay, past patients who stared before they looked away, and pulled the curtain closed around them. “Who’s that, then?” The Matron in charge asked.

“Brother-in-law,” said Crowley. “Great person to cry with. You’ve no idea.”

“She used to be one of our best nurses,” said the Matron. “Still is, if she’s in an operating theater and the patient can’t see her looming over them like a ghost. She and Dr Fell were a great team. She hasn’t cried before. Perhaps she’ll do better now.” She made a dissatisfied sound. “I can’t stand a woman who goes to pieces without a man. The job needs doing whether you’re married or not.”

“It’s not that he was her man,” said Crowley, with the conviction of experience. “It’s that they’d always been best friends. If she were the one in the hold, he’d be just the same.”

She was better after that; but she was not who she had been. 

Well, who was?

Demobbing was a tedious process, but at least, unlike the majority of the men with whom they waited, Crowley and Aziraphale suffered no uncertainty about what they would do when released. Crowley’s orders came by mail from the familiar address, along with a cheque - he was to equip himself up to Prince Boy standard and resume reading law as soon as possible, but until the next term started he might indulge himself. So he was back in favor. Wonderful. Aziraphale was to go home - or at any rate, to Auldmon Abbey - after paying a call on his grandparents. “Of course you must come with me,”  he said to Crowley.  “But the Grimsbys first, I think?”

“Grimsbys first,” Crowley agreed. “You’ve got to meet your namesake.”

“Your namesake, too, dear boy!”

“Second name doesn’t count, Angel.” (But it did.)

Since they saw her last, Mildred had worked in a factory, and taken an accounting course, and chopped all of her hair off. Angie hid behind her skirts at first, but she knew their names, and soon dragged them both to a cupboard to see a cat with kittens. After she was in bed, Mildred broke out a dusty bottle and they all sat up later than they should have, emptying it and talking, first about Grimsby, and eventually about the vast mysterious seas of the past and future surrounding their warm little bubble of present.

The Sturgeon-Prices looked twice as old as they had ever looked at Christmas, and had been managing the Soho properties for months, ever since the man they’d had for the job died of influenza. “Well! I suppose it’s past time I took up that duty, in any case,” said Aziraphale, and they toured the buildings. The flats were shabby cold-water walk-ups.  Businesses came and went in the storefronts, except for the large, desirable, and empty corner location, which had until recently been a recruiting station. The Soho Star Theater was in the middle of a run of Much Ado About Nothing because the company couldn’t afford to pay a living playwright. For purposes of the production, all the male characters had just been demobbed, and all the female characters had been knitting socks and driving ambulances. Beatrice wore bobbed hair and a mannish jacket, Benedick was the man everyone went to for a smoke and a light, Don John dressed in a motley of top brass uniforms and spent most of the first scene quietly stealing everyone else’s medals, and Crowley and Aziraphale almost laughed themselves sick. When they introduced themselves to the manager as representatives of the owner he gave them an earful about leaking roofs, outdated lighting, and worn carpets, to all of which Aziraphale listened intently while taking notes. They spent another evening with Mildred, discussing how, exactly, one went about maintaining commercial properties, and where money came from, and how one went about managing it all when one couldn’t do arithmetic reliably.

Even then, they didn’t go straight to Auldmon Abbey, but stopped by Wellborn Hall to treat the Lamb to dinner, having called ahead to arrange it and been tearfully granted carte blanche by the Headmaster, who seemed to remember a romanticized ideal of them, rather than their real boyhood selves. The Headmaster had always looked older than he was to them; now he was shockingly old, teetering on the edge of the graves of boys and masters who would never sit in class again. Joshua, in his final term, was taller than he should be, and somewhat bewildered at the vanishing of the front which had been looming before him and all his friends as their implacable fate for the past four years. He still hurled himself at Aziraphale, who still picked him up and, unable to swing him around due to logistics of height, whirled himself in a full circle while hugging him. The Exercise Book of the Angel Aziraphale, held by its creator for safekeeping For the Duration, was returned, and Raffles was wept for.

The Wellborn Sixth Form regarded the pair of them as they might have regarded a pair of dodos or dinosaurs. They were allowed to treat the whole Sixth Form in lieu of giving the impromptu patriotic assembly speech that the Headmaster wanted, and though the town’s best restaurant apologized that their fare was still on a war footing, the repast was a sufficient improvement over both military and pedagogical meals to please everyone. The Prince Boy in the assemblage, Carruthers, gave Crowley the rundown on how things fared at the Foundation. Several of the boys were younger brothers of men whose deaths they knew, and those conversations were dealt with as well as could be expected; but after that, the dinner passed to the swapping of school stories and ascended to general hilarity, with less assistance from alcohol than hilarity had needed for some time.

When Joshua saw them off at the station next morning, he seemed somber and hesitant. “You should prepare yourselves,” he said. “It’s always a bit of a shock, when I go back.”

“Has it changed so much?” Aziraphale asked.

Joshua shook his head. “More that it hasn’t changed enough.”

“Well. That will, will be a relief, won’t it, dear? Everything else is so different.”

“You’ll see.”

They did.

Elspeth had managed to fully wire the Abbey and redecorate a few rooms before the War deprived her of workmen, and the Influenza had taken her and the prospective Gabriel V when she was in the middle of working up new plans for postwar splendor. The west wing was more dilapidated than ever. The chapel had two more plaques on the wall, and two more caskets in the crowded crypt below, Raffles’s funeral having gone ahead while Crowley and Aziraphale were still in the demobbing center.  The stable only held four horses now, but Lesley still drove the landaulette that had replaced the touring car a couple of years before the War. Mr Samuels still answered the door, though greyer and balder and presiding over fewer footmen. Mrs Device was thin, stooped, and deaf, and her delight at the sight of Aziraphale was tempered by the shock of seeing him so worn down, but she was otherwise exactly as usual. 

The dogs were still exuberant. The rooms smelled as they always had, and had the same drafts, though less severely now that spring was well underway than they generally were during the Christmas hols. Crowley and Aziraphale got the same set of adjoining rooms on the first floor that they always got when there was no house party going on. The bedclothes were the same, their clothing put away in the same drawers in the same armoires, the same curtains framed the same views.  

They were still expected to dress for dinner, at which the menus and table linen and topics of conversation were all exactly the same. The Abbey had always, it seemed, depended on the home farms for the bulk of their food, and the local women who had proved up to the task of getting the harvest in while their men were in the trenches were still up to it, when those men were either in French graveyards or demobbing. Sandy wasn’t there, because he was with the occupying army in Germany, but Dr Fell brought his wife and daughter-in-law, and they were the same: subdued and proper in prewar gowns. Gabe drove in from Milltown on weekends, in a little runabout, and had already put off his mourning in favor of slim-fitting double-breasted suits in gray, with violet ties, despite Lord Auldmon’s disapproval. His reaction to Aziraphale’s changed appearance was to slap him on the back and boom enthusiastically: “Looks like Army life suited you! Finally whipped you into shape!”

Lord Auldmon was balder and grayer and still spoke in precise measured tones about the Estate, and Duty, and what Aziraphale was to do, and why it was good that he was taking on the responsibility for the Soho properties but -

“Where’s Ruth?” Crowley asked Janey, who sat next to him at dinner eating as if she feared someone might see something go into her mouth.

“She wasn’t home a week before she went to Lancaster and got a job in a hospital there,” said Janey, in her habitual near-whisper. “She said she couldn’t bear to sit around and not work. I thought she needed a real rest, but she wouldn’t listen to me. The poor thing looked dreadful.”

“Don’t we all?” Crowley glanced over at Aziraphale, who was trying to devour roast chicken and fricassee of asparagus while appearing to hang upon his father’s every word. “Although you’re clearly doing something right. You’re positively rosy.” This was an exaggeration, but became almost true when she flushed at the compliment. “Country life agreeing with you, then?”

“It seems to,” she said. “There’s so much more to do here than in town, and the air is so much better, my head hardly ever aches these days. I’ve been raising poultry, and of course the boys keep me exercised.”

Crowley did not neglect this opportunity to set her talking on a subject that genuinely interested her, and the adventures, disasters, and singular virtues of Michael (six), Metatron (five), and assorted chickens and geese kept her happily talking all the way through to the trifle. This confection had been specifically prepared in celebration of Master Aziraphale’s return, and the single, rather elderly, footman in attendance allowed  a hint of gratification to disturb his professional impassive face when he helped Angel to a generous slice, and was rewarded with a properly angelic smile. “Careful, Sunshine,” warned Gabe with what passed for geniality with him. “You’ll fall out of fighting trim, eating like that.”

Aziraphale let the bite in his mouth melt away before opening his eyes and replying: “I certainly hope so. I look like a medical illustration, with layers to lift up in order to examine what’s underneath, only the top few layers have been torn out. No one should have visible abdominal muscles - it’s disgusting. Though to be fair I was much, much more grotesque in hospital.”

Crowley had been alert, since their reunion, for every opportunity to acquire extra helpings of food for Angel - a biscuit here, a cup of cocoa there, taking more than he could possibly eat himself and coaxing Angel to finish it off for him - and took at least partial credit for the fact that he had any cheek at all to smile with, when he felt like smiling. “Never mind, Angel,” he said. “You’ve got most of your face back, and you’ll have a proper belly by the end of the year if you go slow and steady.”

Gabe, who had declined trifle and had no food to occupy himself with, condescended to look down the table toward Crowley and put on a disapproving face. “Don’t encourage him! If he can keep looking like a man instead of a featherbed for a year or two before letting himself go again, we’ll be able to get a really good match for him, with the shortage of men these days, but you can’t expect women to lose all their standards. Especially among the girls Mickey will round up for us. She knows lots of Navy widows, and they’re used to a certain amount of tone in a man. That’s why I’ve taken up tennis and knocked off sweets entirely. Got to keep up the side! You wouldn’t want me to edge you out by default.”

“Bolt,” said Lord Auldmon, in a tone of mild reproof. “There’s no need to be crass. Let your brother enjoy his treat. I’m sure we all hope he finds a suitable wife in the near future, but he only just got home. There’s time enough to worry about that.”

“Ah,” said Aziraphale. “Pray don’t trouble yourselves on the matter. I won’t be making any matches.” He took another bite of trifle, and closed his eyes again. 

“Nonsense,” scoffed Dr Fell. “You’re still in low spirits, but that will pass. It will do you good to think about what you have to look forward to. There has never been a better time in the marriage market for second sons than there is at present.”

Aziraphale’s eyes flew open. “I’m the third son.”

“Sunshine,” said Lord Auldmon. The table left space for him to say more, but he did not; only looked from Aziraphale, to Dr Fell, and back again, before taking another bite of trifle.

“Marriage market.” Crowley had never brought out the full-on Old Mr Prince sneer in this environment before, but the occasion called for it. “Low spirits. Shortage of men! Ask us how many of the boys from our form in Wellborn Hall signed up. Go ahead. Ask us!”

“It’s all right, Crowley,” said Aziraphale; but Gabe - you could always count on Gabe to charge into a conversational minefield; that hadn’t changed, either - was already sneering back.

“Okay, Crawly. How many boys from your form in Wellborn Hall signed up?”

“All of ‘em! Now ask us how many are coming home.”

“I would have signed up,” said Gabe. “I wanted to. Only my duty kept me here.”

“How, how many are coming home?” Janey piped up, turning beet red when everyone looked at her, but there was no need for her to stand her ground. Crowley, already poised to spring, had her covered.

“Let’ss ssee,” he let the lisp and the Scots out: this was no time to play at being posh, “there’ss me, that’ss one. And there’s Aziraphale, that’s two. And - that’ss all. That’ss all of uss. We thought Eden-Fisher would make it, but the intesstinal flu got him in November. Sso excusse uss if we’re a little uncomfortable when people ssay they envy uss our time in the meat-grinder, or that we’re lucky, or that the lack of competition iss good for our marital prosspectss.”

Gabe looked down at his empty plate. “I didn’t say I envied you.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Dr Fell, gone stiff and pale. “I hadn’t realized how thoughtlessly I was speaking. Certainly I meant no disrespect to the noble boys who gave their lives. I was only thinking in terms of the future. This is where our attention should be turned now, after all. We must move ahead. We owe them that, I think - owe it to Raffles, and your Eden-Fisher, and all the rest of those who made the ultimate sacrifice.”

“All my children have done their duty,” said Lord Auldmon. “And I expect those who are - who are left to me to continue to do so.” The unprecedented mid-sentence stumble turned all eyes to him; even the footman’s face almost got an expression. “You are entitled to time to fully recuperate, Sunshine, no one disputes that. You have shown the proper spirit in taking an interest in the properties you and Joshua will come into one day, and I think this is an excellent sign that you are on the high road to recovery, both from your injuries and from your grief. It may not seem likely now, but by the time Mickey begins throwing her excellent parties toward the end of the year -“

“Pater.” Not even Crowley, who knew the road down which they were headed, had expected Aziraphale to interrupt his father; the shock in the room was palpable and he thought the footman needed all his ingrained self-control to maintain his station rather than fleeing. “With the best will and all the recuperation time in the world, there are some duties I will now never be able to fill. Please excuse me from discussing the matter further in front of the ladies.”

Dr Fell and his wife, being active medical practitioners, realized the implication at once; Janey and Lord Auldmon a heartbeat after; the footman got his face back under control while Gabe was still looking puzzled and offended. Crowley covered up his satisfaction by eating a little more trifle, although he was already full. When he and Aziraphale had discussed this beforehand, they hadn’t envisioned it coming up at the dinner table, but hell if the Angel hadn’t taken his opportunity by the throat and committed to it!

“I believe it’s time we withdrew in any case,” said Mrs Dr Fell - the first words she’d uttered since taking her seat. She had never been a great conversationalist, and Crowley had sometimes wondered how she’d ever managed to produce someone as normal and alive as Ruth. The mother-daughter resemblance was marked now that Ruth was only half herself, though; presumably either a similar early widowhood, or marriage to Dr Fell, were responsible for her similarity to a ghost at every gathering. Janey rose with her obediently, but (with an air of daring and resolution) took the opportunity to take Aziraphale’s hand on her way out and squeak: “I’m so glad you and Mr Crowley, at least, made it home!” Aziraphale murmured thanks and squeezed her hand, then told the footman to relay his appreciation of the scrumptious trifle to the cook (still the same cook, though her staff was down to a single girl), and it seemed they were free and clear; but as the port came round Dr Fell turned on him.

“What’s this then? You told us the thigh was crushed, not that there was any adjacent damage!”

Aziraphale winced. Dr Fell had always been the weak spot in the plan, and he’d used a large part of his effrontery budget already. 

So Crowley swooped in. “What, do you imagine that this was information he was anxious to share with the censor’s office?”

“What on earth are you going on about?” Gabe demanded. “Can’t anybody here speak plain?”

“Sunshine is declining to marry on the grounds that he would not be able to perform a husband’s duty, due to the nature of his injuries,” Lord Auldmon explained, with admirable patience. 

“Oh!” The look of horror on Gabe’s face as he realized the implications of damaged wedding tackle made Crowley fight not to laugh; but that would have given the entire game away and he would not let Angel down when they were so near to home and dry. “That’s - well! That’s terrible!”

“Yes,” said Aziraphale, looking deep into his port. “It is. So let’s discuss more pleasant subjects, shall we?”

“Not so fast,” said Dr Fell. “You’ve always given up too easily, if your interest wasn’t engaged, and in light of your established lack of enthusiasm on the subject of marriage, before the War, you must forgive us if we suspect you of doing it again. Come round tomorrow and let me have a look at things. If -“

“Oh, for God’s sake and Satan’s too,” snapped Crowley. “Do you think there were no consultations? Do you think that every army doctor available, and a few civilians on the side, didn’t apply all their expertise to the problem? Nobody wants to leave another man in that state ! Even the miraculous skin-grafting doctor said there was nothing to be done! What on earth do you imagine you’d be able to do for him that hasn’t already failed?”

“I imagine nothing,” said Dr Fell coldly. “When I see the problem for myself -“

“I’m sorry, Uncle Matt,” interrupted Aziraphale wearily. “I know you want to help, but I really have been poked and peered at and experimented on as much as I can bear. You know yourself, it isn’t good for a patient to endlessly chase after impossible cures. I’m perfectly resigned to my condition, and I decline to discuss it any further.”

“There certainly doesn’t seem to be anything to gain by pursuing such a painful subject,” said Lord Auldmon. “Mr Crowley, what are your plans for the near future?”

“They’re hardly my plans,” said Crowley, allowing himself to slouch out of the careful not-quite-erect seat that he’d gotten everyone to accept as his best approximation of proper dining chair posture. “The Prince Foundation is offering to pick me up where I left off, and I’m hardly going to say no, am I?”

Crowley and Angel hardly dared to look at each other through the port, and coffee with the ladies in the drawing room, and farewells to the Dr Fells, and a rather stilted round of billiards, in which Lord Auldmon teamed with Crowley, and Aziraphale with Gabe, by parental fiat, and the conversation was primarily about factories, contracts, investments, international markets (about which Gabe had a great deal to say, as he was still in touch with his father-in-law in Boston), rents, improvements, modernization, and so on. After this Aziraphale, as previously arranged, pleaded weariness and went up to bed by himself. Gabe went outside to smoke, leaving Crowley alone with Lord Auldmon as he racked a game of blackball without consulting anyone. Crowley resigned himself to an uncomfortable tete-a-tete and told himself that it would not look to eager if he followed Aziraphale at the end of the game. A few desultory shots and some equally desultory conversation wound his nerves up, until he was at last relieved by the question: “And how many Prince Boys are coming home?”

Crowley shrugged. “According to this year’s Sixth Form Prince Boy, there’s me, and three waiting to be demobbed in France, and one in the occupation. Not sure how many went.  But we’re all good at surviving, or we wouldn’t be Prince Boys.”

“You have not corresponded with the Foundation directly?”

“They send me a letter when they have instructions. Other than that, I’m not really much of a correspondent,” said Crowley, who had kept up his reports and written faithfully to Mildred for most of the War. “Besides, I was in disgrace when I left. Not for me to make overtures.” He fiddled with the chalk to cover up the tremor in his hands, wishing he had a cigarette; but Lord Auldmon didn’t permit smoking indoors.

“Disgrace? Not for volunteering, surely?”

Crowley barked the mirthless laugh he’d perfected somewhere along the Hindenburg Line. “No, volunteering was my punishment. I didn’t tell the Foundation where I was going when I went along with Angel to bring Mickey home. The Foundation took it personally. But apparently my sins are expiated, now.”

“I see.” Lord Auldmon lined up a shot with excessive care. “You still call him Angel.”

“You still call him Sunshine, and you know he doesn’t like it.”

“You exaggerate.”

“I don’t.”

“Then why does he still answer to it?”

“Because he knows resisting it would be a waste of time. You’ll call him what you want to call him, and the family will follow your example, whatever he does. He’s fought enough pointless battles by now, not to spend more effort on this one.”

Lord Auldmon sighed, possibly because he had missed his shot. “You think I’m too hard on him.”

“Only because you are.”

“Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean I haven’t bent over backwards to accommodate my boys’ peculiarities. All my boys. Bolt’s the only one who walks the line I set, and steps up to take the slack when the others let me down. Raffles should have been the one to deal with the factories, letting Bolt concentrate on the Estate, but no, nothing would do but that he must be a doctor. The Lamb fights me over every smallest thing and questions every single axiom to death. If I so much as say it’s raining out he’ll go to the window to check. And Sunshine has always been the dearest boy in the world, but he’s also mulish, and literally impossible to discipline, and can’t even sleep properly, and on the one hand he was reading Edward Lear when he was three, but on the other hand he can’t reliably add two numbers together. Oxford Don is really the only imaginable profession for him, and at least he has his book to pave his way.  I’ve planned the Lamb’s education on the assumption that he’ll have to be the manager for their mother’s properties, and now Sunshine’s volunteering to take that on, which is highly commendable, but I’m not sure it can be done from Oxford and in any case, how on earth does he propose to do it if he can’t handle basic arithmetic?”

Crowley began to speed up his shots. “That’s what accountants are for. Have a little faith in him.”

“I do. But the family cannot prosper on faith. He is an unusual young man in a world that will chew him to pieces if given half a chance, and this latest development will not make life any easier for him. Nor will he be safe from having to take on the responsibility of the Estate and the headship of the family, a role for which he is completely unsuited, until Bolt manages to get an heir to adulthood. If I am hard on him, and I suppose I am, it’s because the world will be harder.”

“It already has, and he’s still here, isn’t he?” Another one down, and another.

“I don’t like you, Mr Crowley.” Lord Auldmon smiled a cool, dreamy smile, leaning on his cue.

“That’s mutual,” snarled Crowley, sinking another ball. Only the eight ball left, and he could get out of this damn conversation. He studied the table, choosing his pocket.

“You’re a low-born opportunist beholden to an institution that seems set on undermining British society by elevating the lowborn and diluting the ruling classes. You’re angry, and sly, and irreverent, and I do not think you have many scruples. You get along astonishingly well with people you despise, which means you’re fundamentally dishonest in a way that will tend to advance you in society. And you are Aziraphale’s dearest friend. And I’m glad.”

Crowley scratched. He threw his cue down on the table. “What?”

“He needs a friend,” said Lord Auldmon, putting his own cue back in the rack and picking up Crowley’s. “A boon companion, as he used to say.” He sank a ball. “Someone who believes in him, more thoroughly than I can afford to, but can say no to him if necessary, and who will take no as an answer from him, in turn.” Another ball. “You are completely dependent on the Prince Foundation, but you annoyed them in order to help him in a difficult task.” Another ball. “A family task, even though if I’m not mistaken you despise all of us except him.”

“Josh and Ruth are all right,” Crowley muttered. “And blast it, so is Janey, if you’d lower yourself to notice her without frowning her out of countenance.”

“You don’t have to be a good man, as far as I’m concerned, as long as you are good for him.” Lord Auldmon sank the eight ball. “Another game?”

“No, thanks,” said Crowley. “Good night, sir.”

He sauntered upstairs, passing no one, all his nerves thrumming. A light shone under Aziraphale’s door; he passed it to his own, stepped in, and turned the key in the lock behind him. The light from the open door to Aziraphale’s room shown on the turned-down sheets of his bed. Crowley followed the light. 

Aziraphale lay on top of the bedding, in his nightshirt, reading The Man With Two Left Feet by the light of an electric lamp. He was smiling even before he looked up, but when he looked up the smile overcame his whole face. Crowley couldn’t help it; he hurled himself onto him, forcing him to drop the book to catch him. “Oof! Crowley! My goodness!”

“You were glorious, Angel,” said Crowley, between kissing the smile and kissing the not-yet-quite apple cheeks. “You interrupted him! You shocked them all! It’s all over the servant’s hall by now and the village will be pretending not to know it by the end of breakfast! You sold it!”

“And yet you’ve kept me waiting.”  The reproving tone was undercut by the eagerness with which Aziraphale’s fingers undid his tie and got to work on the jacket and boiled shirtfront.

“I’ve been panting to get up here for half an hour, but your father was in a lecturing mood and I couldn’t get away till he’d beat me at blackball. But I’m here now. And we’re halfway home. The hard part’s done. I promised you, we’d find a way to live together but here you’ve been and gone and done half the job yourself! They can’t make you marry anybody now. Isn’t it amazing what you can do, when you stop caring what they think?” 

“I do care, only - Hold still, can’t you? - Only recent events have made it obvious that many of the things they regard as duties simply don’t matter as much as I was raised to think they do - Easy, we have to hang all this up properly or it’ll crease and - Crowley!” Indignation and laughter mixed as Crowley’s hands found their way under the nightshirt, skating over and past the big dimpled scar on the thigh in search of proof of what a wonderful liar Aziraphale was.

They had to be careful. They had to be quiet. They had to be tidy; and at some point, one of them would need to go into the next room and make Crowley’s bed look slept in. But for a little while, the world was as wide and high as the bed and nothing beyond it mattered. These first-floor rooms all had washstands with running water, which was a great convenience, and once again, Crowley had brought extra towels and Vaseline. Afterward they lay in the dark, in the warmth of each other, with the breeze from the open window bringing the smells of spring in to them.

“There’s still the Prince side to take care of,” Aziraphale murmured into Crowley’s shoulder. “I can’t be a Don outside of Oxford. But they’ll want you to practice law in London.”

“Compared to the full weight of family duty and societal expectation, the Foundation’s a doddle,” Crowley assured him, stroking the soft hair in the small of Angel’s back and feeling a bone-melting compassion for the muscles only a skin’s depth away from his fingers. “We’ll sort it out. We’re going to do it, Angel. The life you want. We’re going to have it. Us, together.”

“Oh, dearest. I think I’m beginning to believe that.” Aziraphale kissed him, and sorrow could not touch them.

Chapter Text

The Serpent lolled at its ease, watching Aziraphale prop up the trees which the Archangel’s wings had knocked over, replace the roofs which had blown off, and gather the animals who had scattered in terror. “You know, he’ll never learn from his mistakes if you constantly clean up after him,” it said. “He will never look back and recognize his mistakes, regardless, and the humans who are my charges will suffer to no good purpose,” replied Aziraphale. “You could tell him,” the Serpent suggested. “I’m sorry, do you remember the last time he listened to me?” Aziraphale asked. “Because I do not.” Then the Serpent sighed, and began to pull trees upright with its tail; and when the Angel smiled upon it he said: “I do this not for their sake nor for your own! It is no fun drinking alone and the mead I have been brewing will reach perfection tonight, but the humans will not join me in revelry before this mess is put right.” 

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

Miss Maud Silver, decently attired, her hair properly bunned and curled and contained in its net, ala Queen Alexandra, was finishing up her breakfast and contemplating the results of yesterday’s researches in Somerset House when the sound of the bell surprised her. “Dear me,” she said, setting aside her eggcup. “It is much too early for anyone to call in the normal way of things. If this is not an error, something very grave must have happened.” She heard Emma proceed to the flat’s door as she went to her writing table and examined her current set of exercise books, to refresh her memory as to the state of each investigation, when compared to the news in this morning’s papers. It not being her habit to take up a new case unless any existing ones were in good order, the potential for a sudden crisis to have arisen during her time in town was not large, and unless a particular person had returned unexpectedly from South America, she could not think of any client who would need her so urgently as to come at this hour, without telephoning. She was of two minds, as she answered Emma’s knock, how she would deal with any new case presented to her, for on the one hand she needed to return to Ledlington no later than Saturday night, but on the other hand it went against the grain for her to refuse an urgent plea. 

“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” said Emma, collecting the tray, “but there’s a Mrs Gabriel Fell here, admits she has no appointment and no right to your attention at such an hour, but she says Dierdre Young recommended you and she’s nowhere else to go.”

It would be misleading to say that Miss Silver came alert at the visitor’s name, for she was always alert; but certainly she became interested. “I see,” she said, “and how did she strike you?”

“She’s a lady, all right, and in a terrible state. I think you’d better see her, ma’am.”

“Then I shall do so. Leave the teapot, please.” Miss Silver replaced her exercise books in their drawer, opened another drawer, and drew out a fresh one with a blue cover. She then extracted her knitting from her bag and was engaged in adding a cherry stripe to dear Ethel’s jumper when her caller entered. “Pray have a seat, Mrs Fell,” she said, sizing up her visitor. Ghastly pale, and that black would not have suited her even if she’d had a healthy color; nor had she made any attempt this morning to soften the marks of her distress by artificial means. She had fine large gray eyes, and the set of her jaw and her shoulders indicated that confusion and dismay predominated in her manner through no lack of intelligence or determination. “Will you take some tea?”

“I don’t think I have time,” said Mrs Fell, taking the yellow walnut chair, upholstered in peacock blue, opposite her. “I’m not certain I have any business to be here at all. I’m not sure I have anything for you to conduct enquiries about. Only I, I am - the fact is, I don’t know what to do or where my duty lies and, I’m not sure why, but - I am so frightened. But I only have this morning - not even all of this morning, an hour or two at most.”

Miss Silver set her knitting in her lap and poured tea. “Until the inquest on your brother-in-law’s death adjourns, presumably. Sugar, lemon, or milk?”

“Just, just one sugar, please.” Mrs Fell’s shoulder’s relaxed as she watched Miss Silver prepare her cup. “I thought you might recognize the name. I presume you have been following the case in the newspapers?”

“To a certain extent,” Miss Silver agreed, resuming her knitting. “It is all very curious and unpleasant. I must tell you, now, that though I will do my best for you if you engage my services, my primary duty is not to any client, but to The Truth. Only through finding the truth in such cases can the innocent find any sort of peace. Even a hard truth is better to live with than the most comfortable lie. Nor can I undertake to work for anyone who will not be perfectly frank with me. What you tell me is confidential, and if you keep secrets from me, you set a snare for my feet and make my job impossible. As the poet Tennyson so rightly said: ‘Oh trust me all in all, or not at all.’”

“Yes, I quite see that.” Mrs Fell gripped the teacup in both hands, regarding Miss Silver with a searching, anxious look. “But I’m not - I don’t know how - Miss Silver, I’m not innocent. I didn’t kill my brother-in-law, but I’m guilty in another matter, which I don’t think is connected, except that, that it hangs over everything. If you can help me find my way through this maze I will pay your fee, but I don’t know how to explain the expense to my husband -“

“You will find that to be a smaller matter than you anticipate,” Miss Silver assured her. “You are not the first wife to sit in that chair, whose husband kept an inconveniently close watch on the household expenses. We will find the best way to sort it out when the time comes.” Her needles clicked as she watched Mrs Fell’s face, the eyes darting around the room, only to settle on the soothingly steady advance of the cherry stripe, before nodding acquiescence. “Very well. Since our time is limited, then,” Miss Silver finished off the row and laid the knitting aside, taking up her fountain pen and the blue exercise book, “suppose we start with you telling me what it is that you are afraid to tell the police?”

--
The inquest was well-attended, and Frank did not think that the spectators who came in hope of hearing fresh gruesome details concerning the Westminster Bridge Body were disappointed. Some of them probably now knew more about the operation of bullets upon skulls, brains, and faces than they truly cared to. The Fell family had turned out in force, with only Ruth Fell and the children absent, but they sat in two parts, with Gabriel, Sandalphon, and Michaela on one side of the aisle, and Magdala, Aziraphale, and Crowley on the other. Frank realized that he perceived Crowley as belonging to the Fell family in the same way as Magdala and Ruth did, and wondered a little at how quickly he had accepted the relationship between Aziraphale Fell and Anthony Crowley, without either understanding or approving of it. They did not seem to need his approval or his understanding. 

Frank gave his own testimony early in the proceedings, and spent the rest of the time watching, listening, and thinking. Little of the information gathered by the police was presented, only the discovery and state of the body and such scanty details of Joshua Fell’s final day as had so far been uncovered. The mechanic from Bolton, come up specially on the train in his best clothes, was inclined to make excuses over his failure to offer the bearded motorcyclist a lift back to his machine; Gabriel Fell outlined his final interactions with his brother and his identification of the body in a way both hearty and oddly vague; Newton Pulsifer gave his information with admirable clarity despite his anxious and hesitant manner; Magdala was pale, composed, succinct, and less theatrical than, perhaps, anyone had expected. Only when she sat down again did she falter. Aziraphale put one arm about her and said something quietly, whereupon she leaned her head against his shoulder like a tired child leaning against a parent. Frank looked away, embarrassed.  It is one thing to see such things on the delivery of bad news; to see it in public is another. Aziraphale testified, briefly, about his missing gun, and comported himself well enough. The subject, perhaps, did not offer him many byroads he was tempted to go down.

The verdict, inevitably, was “murder by person or persons unknown,” but it seemed to take a weary while to get there.

When the jury was dismissed and the audience began to disperse, Lamb rose, telling Frank: “Hang about a bit. I need a word with the coroner. Meet you at the car.” So Frank sauntered out toward the street where they had left it, observing a little drama upon the steps as Gabriel Fell, attempting to accost Aziraphale and draw him off from his companions, was inadvertently foiled by a gaggle of reporters descending upon all the family members at once. Crowley, with an adroitness which must indicate a degree of experience, stepped in to direct them back onto Gabriel and Sandalphon and allow Aziraphale and Magdala to dash unhindered to the Bentley parked in a convenient, and illegal, spot. Crowley made to slip off after them, but spotted Frank watching and veered toward him, taking up a position which would allow him to keep an eye on the car. Not that Frank could tell what his eyes did or did not do.  “What the devil d’you mean, putting a tail on us?” He demanded, without preamble.

“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” said Frank.

“Come off it,” said Crowley, sneering. “I know police boots when I see them, and I know a face when I see it loitering outside the office, and again at the flat, and again at the garage, and again here. You’ve talked to Aziraphale twice now. You have to know he isn’t a viable suspect and he damn sure won’t do anything worth watching. I won’t let you harass him and I know exactly which judge to speak to about it, don’t think I don’t!”

Frank considered his options, and said: “There is such a thing as a protective detail, sir.”

Crowley frowned. Frank, discomfited by the glare of the dark glasses, dropped his eyes. Crowley’s gloved hands shook slightly; he crossed his arms, hiding them.  “Protective? What? You’ve found a threat to more than one Fell? Are Gabe and Mickey under watch, too? Or - ” He cursed, in a deeply heartfelt way. “You have evidence against one of them?”

“You know I can’t talk about an ongoing case, sir,” said Frank. “But I do have a question or two for you.”

“I’ve got to take Angel and Mags home and get back to work. Ask me at the office.”

“I don’t think you want to answer these questions at work, sir.”

Crowley swore again, impatiently this time. “Spit ‘em out, then, and be quick about it.”

“What is it, exactly, that you do for Prince and Prince?”

“I’m a solicitor. What do you think I do? Problems need solutions that require detailed knowledge of the law. I solve them.”

“And how did you come to work for the firm?”

The dark glasses regarded him above a thoughtful frown for a long moment. “Aziraphale told you about Prince Boys. Prince Boys work for Princes. That’s what we’re for.” Crowley’s hands gripped his elbows, and he lowered his voice. “I don’t know what Uriel and Kermatin told you yesterday, but I know what’s out there for you to learn. Someday, I will be in a position to assist you in finding it out, all right? But don’t get distracted by the Princes now. If they had anything to do with this, I would bring them to you on a platter, but they’re not part of it.”

If Frank’s suspicions were correct, and his judgement of Crowley faulty, it would be unwise to push this point. Frank pushed it anyway - if he was correct, he wanted to know it, and he was reasonably sure he had Crowley’s measure. “How can you be sure? Do you really think they’d tell you if they killed your friend’s brother?”

“I work for them. I know how they work.” Crowley grimaced. “If they’d been behind it, I’d have had my face rubbed in it by now. They give me a lot of rope, because I’m the best they’ve got for some things and they know it, but they like to remind me how easily they think can hang me, and how high they can make me jump.”

Frank blinked. This was a level of candor for which he was not prepared. “Think they can hang you?”

Crowley barked a laugh. “They tell me to make a problem go away. It goes away. They think they know how I did it. They’re wrong. I’m as safe as a man on a high wire.”

Frank considered the simile. “And you’re not afraid to talk to me like this?”

“You’re harassing me about Uriel Ligur and I’m putting you in your place. Try to tell them different and we’ll see where that gets anyone. Are we done?”

Frank’s brain felt numb. He nodded. Crowley strode toward his car, his peculiar gait exaggerating itself to the point of caricature. Frank reflected on the possible outcomes of mentioning to the Inspector the way the name Prince cropped up repeatedly in the documents he was digging through looking for Hastur’s associates, and decided that perhaps he needed a little more information in order to phrase things correctly.

--

At some point between  Tuesday night and Thursday morning, the bookshop had become a shrine. Magdala had seen it, in passing, but not until she saw Aziraphale see it did the full force of it strike her. None of the wreaths was large, many appeared homemade, but the cumulative effect of them, hanging from the door handle, leaning against the steps, supported on stands, and taped to the window panes, was considerable. “Oh,” said Aziraphale, his eyes shining with tears. “Oh! Crowley, look! The neighbors -“

“I see,” said Crowley. “We’ll have to clear a path.”

He should have dropped them at the kerb and gone on to his office; instead he stopped the car, opened the door to hand first Aziraphale, then Magdala, out, opened the boot, removed Aziraphale’s suitcase, and carried it up the stairs, picking his way among the floral tributes. Someone had been lying in wait, for a flashbulb went off. Magdala ignored it, moving aside a small easel with a wreath of artificial ivy and lilies on it to make room for Aziraphale to unlock the door. A small mountain of notes, envelopes, and parcels thin enough to fit through the mailslot slid across the floor as it opened. 

Magdala picked up an oddly heavy envelope. It was addressed to Mrs Joshua Fell, and when she opened it, coins fell out of a piece of notepaper. She unfolded the paper and read: “Your husband loaned me six shillings two years ago, when I needed it desperate. It takes time but I pay my debts. God bless you and curse the bastard that did for him.” The tears that were never far away began again, as naturally and quietly as condensation trickling down a window pane.

“I can stay.” Crowley put the suitcase at the foot of the spiral stair. “I don’t like this protective detail business. I wish I knew what they knew. Or guessed. Or -”

“They’re on the lookout for anti-semites. That’s all,” said Magdala; hoping (not very hopefully) that none of the policemen on protective detail were themselves anti-semites.

“Dearest, look around you.” Aziraphale put his arms around Crowley’s neck. “We have an entire street full of bodyguards. You’ve already missed a deal of work, and there’s nothing for you to do here except fret.”

“He’s right,” said Magdala, surprising herself with the easiness of her voice. “We’re perfectly safe. We’ll lock the door and stay away from the windows and call you if we leave.”

Crowley sighed. “See that you do, then. I’ll be in and out of meetings the rest of the day, but I’ll tell Miss Murchison to interrupt if you tell her it’s urgent. And if you need anything -“

“We will do what’s necessary. Stop working yourself up. We are perfectly safe.” Aziraphale kissed him, and walked him to the door.

“All right, Angel.” Crowley pushed him against the door frame, in a spot where they would not be visible from outside, kissed him hard, and let himself out. The bell rang cheerily. 

Aziraphale locked the door behind him. “Well! Let’s put the kettle on.”

“You do know that tea doesn’t change anything?” Magdala asked.

“That’s as may be, but brewing it and drinking it at least keeps the hands occupied. Oh! Would you like to make it, my dear? Your hands must be as fractious as mine.”

“You will tell me if I do it wrong,” said Magdala. “After all, I’m not British born. I am the merest apprentice of tea.”

They went into the back room, where there was a small sink, an electric hob, and a cupboard with all things needful to prepare the sacred beverage. Aziraphale sat in a shabby armchair and began sorting through the pile from the mail slot, making new piles on top of the books on the tea table, while Magdala put herself through the motions. She had drunk tea all her life, but Joshua had taught her the ritual, the scalding of the pot and counting of the spoonfuls and all. Her tears stopped flowing and she wiped her face with a napkin, her handkerchief being already damp. “You and Crowley,” she said, “you are so sweet.”

“Don’t let him hear you say that. He objects to being told how sweet he is, for fear it will get back to his employers, who want him to be debonair and cynical.” He scanned a note, blinked a little, folded it back up and put it back into its envelope.  

“That too,” she said. “But I mean, together. You are - like any good married couple.”

“Well.” He placed the envelope on a pile and opened another. “It’s not our fault we’re not married.”

“I - used to think. Used to assume. Before I got my first job in the theater, before I met anyone like you, I - it seemed to me, men with men, women with women, that must be something slightly nasty. Or sad. And then, in the theater, I met people. And then it seemed at worst silly, and often still sad. I knew a set designer - a different young man every few months, raptures and fights and high opera drama.”

Aziraphale put a note down on top of the envelope. “Unlike anyone else you knew in the theatrical circles.”

Magdala rolled her eyes. “Once I started touring, I realized, almost everyone in the theater is like that. If we cannot be the star on the stage, at least we will be the diva in our own lives! But it took some time. And now - I see you, I see Crowley, and I wish...I wish Joshua and I, that we’d had time to become like you. And I think, also - my parents, if I can get my father out, he will be able to bring my mother. Everyone will recognize, they are a matched set. As Joshua married me, and the British consul said, Yes, of course, your wife should be with you, we will move her up the line. But if you needed to leave England, there would be no way to convince the consul, I must go, and Crowley must come with me, we are a set.”

“Fortunately, we don’t have to leave England.” Aziraphale had four piles now. “And Crowley would find a way, if we did. You mustn’t worry about us, my dear! We’ve been doing this for a long time.”

“My mother has been Jewish for a long time,” said Magdala. “It makes her tired, all the things she has to do, merely to be Jewish. Merely to exist as she was born.”

“Yes, I can certainly share that sentiment.”

“And even still. Everyone knows, she is Jewish. She is surrounded by other Jews. But you. The Family. Ruth, Mickey, Gabriel the ass, the Pater - They are not like you. Do they know? That you and Crowley are a set?”

“In a way, probably. In what way - I don’t know. It presumably varies from person to person. Joshua knew because he knew us so well and he let us know he knew, because, well, you know what he’s, what he was like. Maybe Pater suspects. Maybe Ruth understands. We never talk about it, because it’s important, if we are ever charged with gross indecency, for them not to be accessories, for them not to be called upon to lie on the witness stand. It would be so awkward for them. I must be the only liar in the case.”

“But Joshua knew. And he told me. He - should not have.”

Aziraphale shrugged. “On the one hand, no; on the other hand, it is pleasant to have people one can be honest around, even if it is somewhat hazardous. We try to arrange our lives so that the question of choosing between loyalty to us, and committing perjury, does not arise.”

“So you lie to your family, and they pretend to believe you.” She arranged the tea tray with care, the sugar bowl here, the teapot snug in its cozy. “That must be so hard.”

“Not as much as you might think.” He pushed books aside to make room for the tray on the tea table. “You need to understand how truth works in our family. When I was a boy, nothing I did was ever, ever quite the right thing to do. Pater would ask me questions, about myself, about what I’d done or wanted to do or how I felt, and whatever I replied, it was always the wrong answer. So rather than live in misery, trying to get things right that never would be, I learned to do whatever I wanted to do, but garner some idea of what I should have been doing - the servants used to help me with that, and Crowley excels at deducing what people want - and concoct some pleasant fiction on the spot that would make him, in that moment, less dissatisfied. Because no amount of effort on my part will ever satisfy certain people, and most of the time, it doesn’t matter.” 

“How can truth not matter?” Magdala poured and passed him a cup. 

He took a sip and smiled appreciatively. “Perfect, dear. For example. I tell Miss Device’s parents that she lives a quiet life and never goes to clubs or sees people they’d disapprove of, they don’t worry about her, and she lives as she sees fit while remaining where I am readily available to her in case she needs help. Paradoxically, if I wouldn’t lie for her, she would trust me less and be less willing to approach me when she has a problem. You see? One way and another, I lie a great deal. I have to, if I’m to live peaceably and be of any use to anybody.  Anyone who cares to pay attention can find out the truth, regardless, and the fact that they don’t, or if they do, allow the lie to pass, demonstrates the insignificance of the lie. The nature of my relationship to Crowley is simply one more lie that’s been forced upon me. I barely notice maintaining it, anymore, though I do sometimes resent not being able to show ordinary affection where anyone can see. But it’s not as if I am the only one in the family who cannot be straightforward about my life with the others. We all have our different ways of keeping certain truths, er, private.”

Magdala stirred her tea, watching the sugar lump melt. “Even Mickey? I cannot imagine anyone telling her that she is all wrong.”

“If Mickey doesn’t want you to know something, she simply doesn’t say anything about it. For years at a time. If you become privy to one of her secrets, and try to discuss it with her, she will immediately change the subject. If you accidentally brush up against one, she changes the subject. If you try to draw her out, she changes the subject. She’s very smooth about it. Lots of practice.”

“I cannot imagine Joshua lying. But then, I never, I never got to see him with any of his family, except you.”

“Oh, no, Joshua would rather admit every mistake he ever made, row for days, get caned half to death, or lose privileges, than not speak the truth. He was very, very brave that way. And he suffered for it! But he took what Pater said to him about the importance of honesty, growing up, seriously. He believed passionately in values other people only give lip service to.”

“If honesty is so important, your Pater should not cane him for it.”

“He never understood that was what he was doing. I’m afraid there’s a great deal about life that Pater can’t, or won’t, or at any rate doesn’t understand, and no one’s on the kind of footing with him to make him do so. He himself doesn’t need to lie, because he’s in charge - the ultimate authority, the person who decides which truths are acceptable. Uncle Matt would lie day into night, to support that authority and make anything Pater said into the truth. Gabriel and Sandy will tell you they never lie, and they’ll believe it, because - oh, how do I explain this? All they have to do is, to convince themselves that what they think should be true is in fact true, and then nothing they say can be a lie, because they believe it. When they are in error, they will never admit it to you, because they will never admit it to themselves; and if you demonstrate the error beyond cavil, they will immediately decide that they knew the correct facts all along and that your memory of their error is, in fact, your error.” He wrinkled his nose. “It’s very trying. That’s why their wives are so, so subdued. Being married to someone who is always right, no matter how wrong they are - it’s lowering to the spirits, if it doesn’t drive one mad. Ruth’s always been as honest as the day is long, but after about a year of being married to Gabriel and constantly contradicted, she  stopped saying anything of substance at all around him, poor thing. I tried to teach her to lie in self-defense, but it’s too foreign to her.”

“I like Ruth.” Magdala tasted her tea at last.

“I’m glad. But you need to be aware - she will not dare to tell Gabriel that she likes you, until he comes around, as one hopes he must come around eventually, to realizing that you are in fact a member of the family and that you and Ruth liking each other is only right and proper.”

“I’m afraid I won’t make that easy for him. I dislike him already. Possibly more than he dislikes me already.” The tea did not fix anything; but it helped. Somehow. “She loved Raffles. I could tell, when she talked of him. Maybe it was not a great romance, but love was there. She does not love Gabriel. It makes me feel all wrong, that she is married to him.”

“Ah, yes. I was against the match, myself. I don’t think it’s been good for either of them. But in the interim between Gabriel’s first wife dying in the Influenza, and the passage of the law that allowed widows to marry their late husband’s brother, Gabriel had a great deal of trouble interesting a suitable second wife. He almost managed once, but she eloped with her father’s estate manager’s son, and I believe is now raising cattle in Sasketchewan. You would think the, the lostness of the male generation would have made things easier, and perhaps it would have, had he been able to search among a different class of women; but women of the sort he needed, women with independent incomes, of child-bearing years - well, it was a heady time for them. The War had shown that they could manage without men, and many of them decided to do so, or at least to hold out for someone willing to meet different standards than were required before the War. I’m afraid Gabriel did not hide the fact that he was looking less for a wife than for a producer of heirs, which didn’t go over well at all, even among women who preferred to have a man and children in their lives. Whereas Ruth was - I would never have said that she depended on Raffles, but they were always a unit. Everyone took it for granted that they belonged together. They went through everything together and then - he was gone. And she was lost. Going through the motions. When Gabriel and Pater grew frustrated with Gabriel’s inability to find a second wife, and Uncle Matt pointed out that if he married Ruth she would already know all about the family, and it would keep the money she inherited from her father and Raffles in the family - well, I didn’t think it was a good idea, but I didn’t get any say in it, did I?”

“Is this one of the things Gabriel lies about, then? Does he persuade himself they love each other?”

“Oh, my dear! I wish he thought it a significant enough consideration to lie about, but I don’t believe he does.”

Magdala drank tea. Ever since Mrs Potts and Anathema came to her with the news, the world had been a narrow place, only big enough for her great loss and fear of the future; but the tea was strong and sweet and good. The man across from her had loved her husband as much as she had, and shared with him some of the qualities she had fallen in love with, that drew people she had never met to push compassion and forgotten debts through the door. “Sometimes,” she said, “when people talked about Jews - about how evil we are, how greedy, how we are vampires sucking the lifeblood out of Germany - I would start to wonder if they were right. If my mother was wrong, if I and my sister and aunts and uncles and Oma and Opa should not exist.”

“Oh, my dear!”

She accepted his proffered hands. “Oh, I know better. Only on long dark nights when the world was very hard and lonely did I ever think I believed it. But I have my mother and sister and all, to prove all the hatred wrong. You had no one else like you - only Crowley. Did you also have nights and days, when you believed all the things people said about men like you? Were you ever afraid to love him?”

He shook his head, smiling - not a full smile, only a flickering echo of the brightness that rippled outward from him, every time she saw him, while Joshua was alive. “Like finds like, dear. The stacks of notes downstairs are full of friends with similar proclivities. And besides,” he squeezed her fingers between his, warm and soft and strong, and his voice changed to a half-chant, the recitation of lines known life-long: “Love is the fountain of all virtue, incapable of sin. It giveth freely and receiveth joyfully; it’s strength is gentle and its weakness unashamed; its follies are the envy of the wise. Love knoweth no boundary and recognizeth no authority, but fixeth upon those set apart by kings and commanders as unworthy and suitable for hatred, and there findeth beauty and virtue in abundance.” He let go her hand. “I remember my mother reading that to me, and understanding that she loved me that way. When Josh was naughty, I would feel myself loving him that way. And one day, I looked at Crowley, and love had new layers in it, but it was all the same love. It couldn’t be wrong.”

“What book is that? The New Testament?”

He - she thought the word was “chuckled,” if chuckles could sound sad. “No, not exactly! Did Joshua ever tell you about my book?”

“The angel book?”

“Yes! Oh! Oh, I must show you - it’s upstairs.” He drained his cup and stood. “Come.”

She followed him up the stairs, through a door that was a bookcase. He took a worn and battered exercise book from a drawer in his bedside table and opened it at a yellowed bookmark with childish drawings on either side: a black snake hissing “Ssstop Reading and Go to Sssleep” on one side, and an angel on a stack of books, reading by the light of his halo, with the words “Just one more chapter” emerging from his mouth on the other. While he told her the story of it, she turned the pages as reverently as if they were the Torah, admiring the pictures and reading the uneven scrawling hand of a small child striving past his capacity in order to make something wonderful for someone he loved, and was overwhelmed.

Someone had betrayed him. Someone had murdered him. But his love was still here.

Chapter Text

But Gabriel was loath to don a body for himself, greatly preferring the body of light, with tongues of flame, in which he was accustomed to move across the face of the earth. So he said to himself, “It does not matter which angel wrestles Jacob, for we are all far mightier than any man, and Aziraphale already has a body, which he seems to manage well enough; therefore I need not lower myself.” So he sought for Aziraphale, and found him at a wedding feast, where he had been for many hours, eating and drinking and learning to dance, showering blessings upon everyone from the bridal pair to the turnspit dog, amid much merriment. Then Gabriel was cross with him, saying: “Cease this foolish indulgence at once, for you must go to the Ford of Jabbok, and wrestle Jacob there.” So Aziraphale, all weary, did as he was bid, though it was not clear to him why he must wrestle Jacob, or what Heaven’s purpose was.

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

Reading law was easier with the dark glasses. The solid blocks of text were as impenetrable as ever, but nobody asked awkward questions anymore when Crowley paid someone to read them out to him. True, it took him several tries to find someone to help him study who both read well and didn’t try to impose inconvenient forms of “help” upon him. He often had to be savagely rude in order to scare off self-important busybodies who tried to guide him or give him advice as if they understood his condition better than he did. But everything’s a trade-off.

His old circles of connection were quite broken up, in the wake of the War, but everyone was in the same boat there, and if nothing else, his experience of making and losing transient acquaintances on and behind the lines, that long procession of doomed nameless boys, had honed his ability to establish a connection and make strangers feel comfortable with him immediately, if it suited him to do so. He was the oldest Prince Boy at the University of London, and they regarded him with a kind of awe he was certain Old Mr. Prince had never intended: the one who was cut loose, made his own way through Hell without Foundation support, and picked up again, seamlessly.

Well, almost seamlessly. Crowley felt the seams, himself. But he could hide them from other people, cover them with sarcasm and bad temper, swagger and wit, and the version of the Prince sneer that he had made his own. Nobody else had to know that sometimes the smells of mud and petrol made his heart race and his chest hurt. Nobody else needed to know when he heard guns. Nobody noticed how his hands shook sometimes, as long as he kept them busy enough, fiddling with pens and cigarettes. Nobody else needed to know that the nights on which he never went to bed, but stalked the streets of London drinking and dancing and attending the lowest, noisiest theaters and clubs and cinema shows, were the nights on which he could feel the nightmares lurking. The nights when sleep would be all flame, mudfields, and wet forests: Aziraphale hanging screaming in barbed wire; Grimsby and Angel buried side by side in a trench with only their heads above the dirt, until Old Mr. Prince stamped them down; Lord Auldmon picking his children off one by one as they obediently lined up for his shots; driving drunk and blind, unable to open his eyes, across plowed fields and into flame because Angel burned and only Crowley could get him out; always driving, driving, driving, but never in control of where he went or what he saw. Sometimes they ambushed him, these dreams, and no amount of alcohol could defend against them; but sometimes he felt them coming, and on those nights he simply did not sleep. This made the next day hazy and dreamlike, but when the new night finally came he would be so exhausted that he’d fall asleep as soon as he permitted himself to lie down, and would have no dreams at all.

Crowley took tea with Mildred Grimsby once a week, at least. More often, when Aziraphale came to town. He had hired her to manage numbers for him, and put her in touch with Ligur to invest his manager’s salary in order to generate some sort of revenue with which to improve the properties. This resulted, somehow, in her making friends with Jeannette, who often brought Uriel to tea, also. 

Angie still looked like a miniature version of Grimsby, with a severe bob, a sunny smile, and a way of peering intensely at the world that probably meant she was shortsighted and would need eyeglasses when she began lessons. Uriel was still beautiful, and Ligur spared no expense to highlight this, dressing her in lace and ribbons, which Jeannette would remove and replace with one of Angie’s sensible sturdy smocks for the duration of the visit. The girls would bolt their teas and run all over Mildred’s flat, giggling and squabbling and having a wonderful time. Aziraphale had become enamored of stage magic, and amused the girls endlessly by pulling pennies and biscuits from their ears, finding their chosen cards in odd places, and walking shillings across his knuckles. Crowley’s hands never shook during these visits.

Jeannette was the one who told them about the Prince Foundation blackmailing Mickey. “He tried to keep Uriel secret,” she explained, her English now posh enough for Mayfair, with a charming edge of French. “But it could not be done! And once she was known, the Foundation would know her mother’s name. The flat is not his, the manservant is not his, the brokerage is part of the Foundation - if he does not satisfy them, he has nothing to support a child on. The first spring of the War, Madame called him in a temper. She had a letter through her mail slot, wanting ten pounds and telling her where to leave it. She had her husband’s baby in her and could not afford to ignore a threat, but she was so angry!”

“I don’t wonder,” said Aziraphale, much shocked.“After she went through so much to keep the secret!”

Jeannette shrugged. “ Every quarter, he gives her the money, under cover of her dividends, she takes the cash where she is told to take it, someone who works for the Foundation collects it, the Foundation is satisfied until the next quarter, there is no bank withdrawal for her husband to notice. Sooner or later they will up the rate, but Mr Ligur says the Foundation has so many sources of revenue, they need never squeeze any one of them too tight. It is a farce, but the little angel is safe, Madame is safe, and that is what matters.”

Aziraphale waited until they had bidden Mildred and Angie good evening, and put Jeannette and the tired-out Uriel, redressed in her finery, into a cab, and were walking leisurely to nowhere in particular, the evening being fine by London standards, to say: “I suppose, when you graduate, you’ll be blackmailing people for the Foundation, too?” His voice sounded smaller than it ought to.

“I expect I already have been,” said Crowley. “Some of those messages I deliver are probably demands for cash. Some of the parcels are probably picking up the profits, or dropping off payment for services rendered. Probably being a solicitor will involve more fraud than blackmail, but blackmail doesn’t require any special skills, so the responsibility of pulling it off gets spread around. As far as I can piece together, nobody ever has to directly victimize someone they know socially - just pass on what we know about them. Their weaknesses. Their mistakes. Their drunken confidences. And, maybe, set them up. But the Prince Foundation is built on misplaced trust. They won’t jeopardize any connections by making the profiting steps too personal. I doubt very much that a single Prince-trained valet has ever stolen jewelry from their own employer.” They walked three paces in silence, Crowley’s nerves crawling the entire time. “You knew this, Angel. I told you.  I’ve always told you everything.”

“I know that. It’s not your fault I didn’t - realize it. That it all seemed like a story to me.” 

“Well. Not your fault, either. S’not the world you were born to, is it?”

“Don’t be ridiculous! Of course it is!”  Angel sounded angry, but the hands he habitually folded in front of him when walking began to clench and writhe in preparation to being wrung. “What is the great British Empire but a gigantic robbery and protection racket? Our language has a word for ‘piracy on behalf of the government,’ for pity’s sake! And we’re all, all born into it and and and told sanctimonious lies about it and by the time we realize it, if we realize it, we’re already in so deep -“

“Hey,” said Crowley. “Hey. Angel. Breathe. It dinnae help to fash yerself.”

Aziraphale obediently took a deep breath, and then another. His hands quieted, but his bad leg, which normally was indistinguishable from his good leg, started to hitch. Possibly no one who knew him less well than Crowley would have noticed. “This is what you wanted us to run away from, at the bandstand,” he said, barely audible over the traffic. “Not just the War. The Prince Foundation. The Family. The Estate. The Empire - all of it.”

“Yes. But it was mostly the War. And you were right. There wasn’t anyplace to go, where we could be free of all of it, and we’d have to leave Josh, and Mildred, and Angie. What would Josh’s life be, without you? He’d have to read economics. He’d have to take on the Soho properties, and they’d be that much more run down by the time he got to them. Maybe - maybe you and I won’t ever get completely free, maybe there’s no free to get, but we can at least make Josh freer than he would be. We can keep an eye on Mildred and Angie. We can fix up the theater. Improve your tenant properties, make them good places to live rather than desperate squats. We’re not completely helpless here. Not as long as we’re together.”

“Can we - be together? Really? Won’t the Foundation - they’ll want to use what we have against me, the way they used Ligur and Uriel against Mickey. And don’t tell me you won’t tell them, because they’d be fools not to know about it and I forbid you to take the risk of lying to them about it!”

“Forbid me?”

Angel had flared up; he subsided again, looking guilty. “I’m sorry. Of course I can’t forbid you anything. That’s their job. And they could forbid you to see me. Forbid us to be us.”

“They won’t. There’s no advantage to them in that. It’ll be like Ligur and Mickey - we’ll pay them off, together. A little extra expense. That’s all.”

“Until they decide they want more. Of you. They’ve raised you to be a criminal. You’ve been part of blackmail. You expect to be part of fraud. Will they try to make you steal something outright? Will they, will they try to make you hurt someone?”

“I doubt it. They’ve got the failed Prince Boys for that sort of thing; they’ve got connections. Like Hastur. I’m sure he’d love to be paid to arrange an accident for somebody if they need it. And I’m sure he’s done it. But they’ve put a lot of effort into making me seem posh. They won’t throw that away. Nice clean crimes only, for me, I’m sure, and providing the information that brings good marks to their attention.”

“Nevertheless. They’ll make you part of the machine pushing other boys to do - whatever they want, whatever they think will benefit them - so many boys, and none of you with viable choices, not at the age they start you. It’s a kind of slavery.”

“It’s a comfortable kind of slavery. We’re better off than if we’d been left in the gutters we were picked out of.”

“Are you? They pick the loneliest, brightest, most enterprising, most poverty-stricken boys and tell you, that you have no chance without them, and if you refuse that chance, once you understand what it means, they’ll destroy you. And they can, because they know everything you’ve ever done, and they’ve seen to it that they can tear everyone you love away from you with some well-chosen half-truths.”

“Not everyone!” Crowley wanted to take his hand, to squeeze it, to signal to him: I know I have you, I trust you, I know they can’t chase you off. But he couldn’t, not walking down a busy street in London, no matter how dark it got. Hand holding was for deep darkness in a theater, alleys, and private rooms.

“Not in your case, no. But they’ve convinced you - haven’t they? - that your own brightness and enterprise would not have been enough to build your own life with. That without them, you would be nothing. And it isn’t true.”

“It is though. It doesn’t matter how bright and enterprising a left-handed ginger Scottish orphan with a lisp and a funny walk is. I am where I am because the Foundation put me here. And so is Ligur. And so is every single other Prince Boy.”

“You wouldn’t be as comfortable without them, no. You wouldn’t have high-status educations and posh accents and high-paying jobs. But you wouldn’t be nothing. It’s not nothing to be the brightest dockworker in Edinburgh and organize your fellows to strike for better pay. It’s not nothing to learn a trade and be good at it. It’s not nothing to write cheap novels that entertain shop girls, or go on the stage, or do any of the things that bright, enterprising children grow up out of poverty to do.”

“The ones who grow up, and get lucky,” said Crowley. “Who don’t die of whooping cough or cold or despair. I don’t know who I’d be without the Prince Foundation, but I wouldn’t even know you. For that alone, I owe them.”

“You don’t owe them anything!”

Angel believed that; it flared off him like light off a star, and his mouth had gone mulish, and Crowley didn’t want to argue with him. “All right. I promise you I’ll figure out how to get out from under them. It’s part of the promise that we’ll live together. You know I’m good for it. But they’ve got the whip hand of me at the moment, and we’ll have to live with that for awhile yet.” Crowley realized he’d been paying no attention to where they were going, and looked around to get his bearings.  What he saw jolted him right out of the argument. “Angel! The Eternally Closed Bookshop! It’s open!”

“What?!” Aziraphale’s head whipped around, his face lit up with joy, and he struck off across the street to the small lighted shopfront, at the window of which he had lingered hungrily many times. “Oh my God oh my God, it is!”

Crowley followed him more cautiously, and spent the next two hours buttering up the shopkeeper, who was not fond of selling books, but by the time Crowley had told him all about The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, including Aziraphale’s destiny to translate it and become a Don; by the time Aziraphale himself had discussed print runs and bindings and preservation with him; by the time they had sorted through all the books he’d looked at and desperately coveted, and counted up all the cash he had on him, and explained that he couldn’t write a cheque because Pater had absolutely forbidden him to buy books not directly related to his degree and he oversaw the bank account, and the disappointment set in - by that time the old man was willing to give him a break on the price of the particularly fine edition of Paradise Lost and the first printing of Idylls of the King which had been read till the binding was loose. He shut the shop again the moment they stepped outside it. They bore their purchases off, triumphant, to a nearby restaurant for supper, and thence to a theater showing a revue that Crowley had been wanting to see, and thence back to his room.

Crowley never had nightmares when Aziraphale was in his room. His hands never shook when they went about together. He didn’t need to smoke, and he drank just enough for pleasure, never enough for numbness. When Aziraphale was with him, he almost might never have been in the War at all. Almost.

He didn’t talk about the bad moments with Aziraphale, who was plumping up nicely, and had become fussy with his grooming, visiting a barber once a week, where as well as a trim he would indulge himself in a manicure and a hot towel shave. All the coarseness was smoothing out of his skin, the ground-in grime vanquished at last, the fat filling out the contours of the muscles, and he exuded softness and comfort. He had always had a reading habit; now he began to actively buy books as never before. He could not pass an open bookshop without browsing and emerging with one or two purchases, lamenting other works that had been out of reach of his purse: new volumes of detective stories, old volumes of poetry, dense works on the Apocrypha, frothy romances, acknowledged classics, first-time authors - he wanted them all, read them with the hunger of one who had starved for years in the trenches, and exulted over new acquisitions. The sparkle returned to his eyes, the apples to his cheeks, and the smiles to his face, chasing before them the dull flatness that had overcome him at the Front.

The first time Angel had attended Oxford, he’d been obsessive about attending all the lectures, which someone who read so well certainly didn’t need to do; swotted each essay; joined clubs he didn’t care about because his father insisted that rowing and fencing were important somehow; and worried all the way to his examinations. This time, he came into town more than once on days when he should have had a lecture, talking with great animation about the texts he was translating in the library, and all the little byroads of history they sent him down. Joshua was with him now, reading history, joining political clubs and arguing over how to fix the world, and Aziraphale, when he didn’t bring his brother along to speak for himself, reported his latest idealistic notions with pride and affection. The only club he joined himself was a new dramatic society, where once again he labored back stage. He was regarded by his fellows, and by Joshua’s friends, as the equivalent of a kindly uncle, to whom they could pour out their woes over tea and biscuits, and with whose problems he could be trusted. He often had solutions for them, too, and when he didn’t, he consulted Crowley, who thus also found himself in an avuncular role to people barely younger than him in years, but enviably younger in experience. They reminded him of the boys who’d paraded past him during the War, despite their posh accents and often ridiculous difficulties, so he taught them “Mademoiselle from Armentieres” and tried to inject them with common sense, laughing - not unkindly - about them with Angel and Mildred over tea.

Aziraphale’s properties were his primary reason for coming into town on lecture days, because try as he might, there had been too much to accomplish before term started. First he had to understand what he needed to do, and then he had to figure out how much it would cost, and then he had to wrangle a bank loan, and then he had to get his father, who never left Lancashire if he could help it and wanted him to start all over with a Milltown bank, to London to countersign the loan, which he insisted on doing himself, though Aziraphale’s grandparents would have happily done so, and not tied so many strings to the act, either. Crowley had to take Angel to supper, several times, to listen sympathetically to all these trials, and feed him until his face started crinkling comfortably again. 

He simply had too much to do to do it all at once. The flats were unsanitary and ill-lit, the businesses run-down, the theater - the only consistent rent-payer - in urgent need of renovations. The corner shop, solidly built at the beginning of the previous century, should have let for a tidy sum, between its location and its beautiful features; but in practice was nearly unleaseable due to its layout and the makeshift way it had been modernized over the years: a lightless kitchen in the basement, with a coal range venting haphazardly into the courtyard, a bathroom carved out of the scullery fifty years before and not updated since, and no electricity at all. Mildred managed to get a pawnshop into the space, at a rent that prevented them from losing money on the place, but this was an obvious stopgap. If the building was ever to earn its keep it needed a major overhaul. 

Even should the bank and Lord Auldmon countenance the amount needed to bring all the properties to the standard Aziraphale (guided by Joshua’s improving-the-world notions) considered necessary, the work would have stopped all rents for at least two years, followed by a re-letting period - and where, Aziraphale fretted, would the existing tenants go in the meantime? Not even Crowley could persuade him that this wasn’t his business, for once he met them (and he kept on meeting them, bent old women and weary young ones, dirty children, artists living on bread and margarine in order to buy paint, writers paid less than a penny a word, actors and actresses who were also waiters and artists’ models, men with the marks of war and poverty on their bodies, all invisible to the people frequenting the clubs and restaurants and theaters around them) he regarded them as his, in the same way that the tenants and villagers at Auldmon were his father’s:  people to whom he owed certain responsibilities.

In the end, the loan that Lord Auldmon came down from Lancashire to countersign covered the theater renovations and some urgent minor improvements to the flats, with the rest postponed for a time when the theater had begun to benefit from the changes underway and could afford a larger rent. After the signing, all those personally concerned lunched at the Ritz: Crowley, Angel, Lord Auldmon, the theater manager and his wife, the Sturgeon-Prices, and Mildred Grimsby, done up in her best business outfit, the first clothing she’d bought new for herself since the beginning of the War. Lord Auldmon and the Sturgeon-Prices, though a bit taken aback by her, were the soul of politeness - to her face. Crowley had to make an afternoon lecture, and only learned that they disapproved of her the next day, when instead of taking the train back to Oxford Aziraphale showed up at his rooms, wringing his hands and stuttering about how they had  combined to lecture him all the previous evening on the unwisdom of relying upon a woman in business. 

“They they they think I’m hiring her as a a a charity!” He paced the width of the room, and turned, and paced, and turned. “They say she she she’ll leave me in the lurch to marry again and that women have no head for numbers, of all the ridiculous things to say to me, and I’ll I’ll have to spend too much time watching out for her errors of judgement because women can’t aren’t shouldn’t - they were all at me at once, even Grandmother, who said who called her a a cool piece who was clearly angling to marry me! It was a complete nightmare and I had to had to had to absolutely snatch the telephone out of Grandfather’s hand to prevent him from calling someone he knew to find me a replacement!”

“Angel. Breathe now,” said Crowley. “You didn’t -“

“Of course I didn’t, of all the ungrateful - I could never look her and Angie in the face again - and then Pater told me to at least cut her retainer because women shouldn’t earn as much as a man, something about how you pay more for a horse than for an ox to do the same job because of horses being more valuable than oxen even if the ox does the job better and that started the whole row up again - Oh, Crowley, you don’t know how hard it was, not to say - not to throw it in their faces, how how how male managers had caused all the problems I’m trying to fix now -“

“For my money, you should have said it,” said Crowley, stepping into his path and taking his hands. “It’s all right. You stood up to them and you won, didn’t you?”

“I, I, I,” he took a deep breath. “I, yes, I did. Didn’t I? Goodness, I did!” The smile came out and he wiggled. “It was terrible but I did!” His face fell again. “They’ll keep after me about it, though. If anything goes wrong they’ll be sure to blame Mildred, and -“

Crowley batted the concern aside. “One thing at a time. You need somebody you can trust to deal with day-to-day stuff while you’re at Oxford and you can trust Mildred. As for the future - you should get Mickey on your side.”

Aziraphale blinked at him. “Mickey? Why should she be involved with my rows?”

“She may not care about the Soho properties, but fighting Mildred’s corner would be the same as fighting her own. They’re walling her out of decisions about the factories. Ligur complained about it last time I saw him. She doesn’t think Gabe’s ploughing enough of the profits back into the business, wants to take on the management of her half now so she can do things her way. Gabe laughed at her when she made the suggestion, and when she took the matter to your father he basically patted her on the head and told her to run along, plan her next party, and leave the business to the menfolk.”

“Oh! How very rude! And Pater knows Mickey is more clever than Bolt is - he’s said so, more than once. Horses more valuable than oxen, indeed!”

So even when Aziraphale was anxious, he was anxious in a normal, healthy way. Crowley understood the value of that. Still, he’d rather Aziraphale be happy rather than anxious, and did not want to waste any of their time together letting him be anxious about little things like Crowley’s nightmares and occasional long moments of painful, irrational terror.

Guy Fawkes was on a Wednesday this year, and Crowley hadn’t even noticed it was coming. He had far, far too much to do for that nonsense. He had a few bad moments during the day, when impatient souls threw firecrackers in the street, but he managed to keep it under control. He had, after all, kept it under control for four long years of constant guns, thudding and cracking in his head even when he drove far enough away from the lines that no one else could hear them. He got through his lectures all right and returned to his lodgings in the midst of a flock of his student neighbors, disputing whether ‘twas better to brew up their teas illegally in their rooms or to spend recklessly in one of the nearby teashops (nobody thought it better to obtain their tea in the student canteen, though many of them would do so), when he spotted the familiar rounded figure sitting on the bottom step, reading De Nugis Curialium. He looked up at the approach of footsteps through the dusk, and smiled a properly social smile as he greeted the young men going up past him - they all knew him, by now, “Crowley’s Oxford mate,” and did not pass him without a nod and a smile and a hello. Crowley hung back, watching him, not liking the tension in his shoulders; until it was only they two, and the smile changed from social to relief. Crowley reached down and pulled him to his feet. “Hullo, Angel. Wasn’t expecting you.”

“Er, neither did I.” Angel tucked his book into his overcoat pocket. “Only, I had a sudden, I felt like, I got an urge and hopped on the train and here I am.”

“Always glad to see you. Shall we go get tea?”

“Could we, I think, in your room? If you don’t mind?”

“Why should I mind?” Crowley followed him up the stairs, watching his shoulders, his gait. (Not his arse, this time; it was hiding under the overcoat, and the shoulders and the gait warned him that this wasn’t that sort of visit.) He unlocked the door, held it for Angel to pass in first, stepped in after him, locked it again behind them, and hung up their coats and hats, moving them both away from the door before he opened his arms and Angel came into them. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” lied Aziraphale, resting his head on Crowley’s bony shoulder. “Bad day, that’s all.”

“Happens to all of us.” Crowley rested his own head in the curly fluff, which hadn’t been Brilliantined today, smelling the cold and damp of November layered on top of the cologne he’d started wearing. “Me, I’ve had variations on contract law all day and my head’s numb with it.”

“Your poor dear head,” said Angel. They stood there like that for a long warm moment more; then he stepped back and let go, smiling a nearly-normal fond smile. “For my part, my day has improved immensely in the past two minutes.”

Crowley took off his glasses and put them on the overmantel. “So has mine.”

They brewed tea over a spirit lamp, stirred up the fire, and talked of little things, knees almost meeting between the armchairs by the hearth. Joshua won his debate; Mickey has yet to respond on the subject of Mildred, but she will want brothers and associates of brothers to stand wallflower duty at her parties this season and no doubt we can discuss that then; where do you get these scrumptious biscuits; Angie has decided to be the lady who plays the organ at the cinematograph when she grows up, and to build castles in her spare time; rehearsals for Hamlet are being disrupted by the love triangle of the prompt-boy, Laertes, and Guildenstern, to the extent that Ophelia has threatened to walk out half a dozen times; rumor is that women might be able to get the degrees they’ve earned as early as next year, if one can speak of ‘early’ in this context -

A fusillade, and they both hit the floor.

Tea everywhere. Someone whooped. Aziraphale covered him, trembling, as Crowley tried to drag him beneath the sofa which wasn’t high enough dammit - dammit -

Dammit! The room smelled of floor wax and Aziraphale instead of mud and petrol, and Crowley knew what had happened. He wriggled out from under and hurled himself to the door, fumbling at the lock with shaky hands, and looked up to see the youngsters on the top floor leaning over the stairwell dangling three more strings of firecrackers. With a roar of fury he charged up, unable to stop the first one lighting and falling, crackling banging raining deathly terror down the center of the well, but he barreled into the kid holding the second string and tore it out of his hand before it lit, reached out with the free hand to grab the blighter with the matches by the tie and jerk his head down toward the stairwell, swearing the whole time. Everybody else scrambled away from him and he found a more or less coherent sentence to throw at them. “What the devil do you think you’re doing? Are you twelve? No, a twelve-year-old would have more sense! What do you want to do, set the place on fire?”

“We’re not going to set the place on fire,” said the kid still holding a string. “Calm down, mate. It’s only firecrackers. It’s Guy Fawkes Day, innit?”

The kid with the matches made a strangled sound. He presumably was objecting to being held head down over the drop, but Crowley didn’t care.

“It’s Guy Fawkes Day outside! Where it’s damp and the pavement doesn’t burn and there’s no people going up and down the stairs! What do you think is in firecrackers, you idiots? It’s gunpowder! The stuff that explodes! That spreads fires and blows holes in the landscape and buildings and people!” He shook the tie in his hand for emphasis and the kid inside the tie dropped the matches to catch hold of the stair railings.

“Crowley.” His name, in Angel’s voice, but in an unfamiliar tone. “Stand down. He’s turning blue. Crowley. Stand down.”

“What? Oh, all right.” Crowley let go of the tie and stepped back. The matches kid fell back into the arms of his fellows, clawing at his tie and gasping. Angel stood abnormally straight as he came up the stairs, an alien expression on his face. Alien, but familiar, from other, unloved faces. Crowley became tangentially aware of the firework boys staring at him - of faces looking up from the stairwell, where other tenants had come out to see what the ruckus was about - but he only truly saw Aziraphale, coming up the stairs in his shirtsleeves and his waistcoat and his clean creased trousers, with a face like a bloody officer.

“What, what happened to your eyes?” Somebody asked.

Right, no glasses. “The War happened, what d’ye think?” Crowley snapped, as Aziraphale asked haughtily: “What happened to your manners? Did you actually throw them away with your common sense, or are they both temporarily stored somewhere safe? Either way, I suggest you go and retrieve them immediately. All of you.”

A couple of the kids must have been through some amount of training before the Armistice, because they had gone to attention at the sound of the voice. “Yes, sir,” said the big-eared Prince Boy in the back. “Sorry sir. We didn’t mean any harm.”

“And yet, you might have done it,” said Aziraphale. “And all the sorry in the world wouldn’t have fixed it. Give me those - how many have you got?” He held out his hands, firm and steady, and they dropped more strings of firecrackers into them, a dozen or so, and a Roman candle, at which he raised one eyebrow in a way that crushed the holder of it like a sledgehammer crushing talc. They were barely older than Joshua; nice boys, no doubt, and Crowley’d taught some of them to sing “Mademoiselle from Armentieres,” and without the Armistice how many would be dead by now? “All right,” said - Captain Fell, this was Captain Fell, a person of whose existence Crowley’d long been aware but whom he’d never seen before - “Fortunately, no harm’s been done, so go enjoy your evening, lads - after you get the manners and common sense back. But if you’re going to enjoy it with fireworks, do it someplace less flammable, hm? Jolly good. Come along, dear boy. The tea will be getting cold.” He turned and started back down the stairs, and Crowley fell in with him.

Someone in the back cleared his throat. “You don’t have any authority over us. Granted, it was stupid to toss ‘em down the stairwell, but taking our firecrackers - that’s stealing.”

Crowley looked back, snarling, but Captain Fell only tilted his head, said, “Is it? Dear me,” and continued downstairs, past doors which closed as people drew their heads back in advance of their passing, to Crowley’s open door. They went in, Crowley closed the door, and Aziraphale sank to his knees, shaking all over, so that the paper coverings of the firecrackers rustled against each other. Crowley took them from his unresisting hands, carried them to the washbasin, threw them in, and opened both taps, stirring them till they were all safely soaked and the paper started to leak wet black powder. He turned off the taps and left them there, returning to Angel, still kneeling and trembling, with tears pouring down his face. Crowley knelt in front of him and took his hands. “It’s all right. Couldn’t explode now if a mortar landed on ‘em.”

“They’ve been setting them off all day, in Oxford,” said Aziraphale. “One or two, I only jump, but the strings of them - the third time I hit the dirt I picked myself up and everyone was staring and I, I headed for the train station. Not a word to anyone. The Lamb has no idea where I am. I had to sit there for over an hour before the train came, but with all the steam and the echoes I couldn’t hear the, the, the -”

“The guns,” said Crowley. “Yeah. I still hear the damn things off and on, even when there’s nothing at all. I had it under control, but - damned if that didn’t sound like a squad coming in hot right outside the door! I should go check on the one-armed fellow on the ground floor. He was at the Somme.”

“Yes. Yes, of course you must.” Aziraphale managed a shaky smile and kissed him. “Perhaps he’d like to share a cup. I’ll clean up the mess and make more tea.”

So Crowley went down, found the one-armed fellow sitting in the dark with a bottle of brandy, and brought him and the bottle back up. They drank tea and brandy and nibbled on biscuits, talking about men they’d known, about the Christmas truce, about boots that didn’t fit and pretty Frenchwomen, comparing the leaves they’d taken in Paris. The story of Angel going AWOL in his dress uniform made the one-armed fellow roar with laughter, and he didn’t need to know that ending the evening in a brothel didn’t mean what he assumed it meant. Around half after seven the big-eared Prince Boy knocked apologetically and asked if they wanted anything from the chippy down the street, so they had nice greasy fish and chips, with vinegar and beer, without having to go out in the cold and the damp and the showers of sparks. The one-armed man passed out on the sofa and missed the late night artillery barrage, during which Crowley and Angel lay in each other’s arms, very quiet and still, providing no target.

Crowley didn’t go to any of his lectures the next day. He and Angel took a walk around Russell Square and, when it started to rain, the British Museum, where they lunched at the café. 

“Mud and petrol,” said Crowley. “That’s the worst. Other things, sometimes, out of the blue, things that make no sense, but always, smelling mud and petrol, I won’t be able to breathe and, my heart -“

“It beats too fast,” Angel agreed. “It hurts. It feels like dying. It feels like, like when I thought I knew that you were dead.”

“ My hands shake for no reason, you remember how they used to shake? I’ll go for days steady as you please and then suddenly there it is again. And nightmares. I don’t want to talk about them.”

“No, no, by no means talk about the nightmares! It gives them power, if you think about them. Let them float away with the sun. But if the sun’s not available - I smell cordite, sometimes. It’s not there, but I smell it. And trench mud. It’s a different smell than honest mud, you know. Wearing cologne helps, unless nothing does.”

“I can’t eat bloody meat anymore. My throat closes up. Don’t like walking past the butcher’s. The sausages look like - never mind.”

“Yes, dear, I know. Sometimes drinking helps, but sometimes I’ll take a drink and right before it hits my tongue it will be that awful, awful stuff the lads brewed in the still. Sometimes the light goes wonky, or everything seems, seems very far away. It helps to eat, to eat really good food.” He shuddered and wrung his hands. “Crowley. Do you ever, do you ever feel the lice?”

“The lice?” Crowley turned away from the Rosetta Stone that they’d been studying in lieu of looking at each other, horrified. Despite not having brought a change of clothes with him from Oxford, Angel looked as though he’d stepped out of a bandbox, his hair Brilliantined, his trousers creased, his coat and waistcoat fitting beautifully. “No! I mean, I still have the fine tooth comb and sometimes I just, y’know, make sure, but - no, I’m clean as a whistle now.”

“I feel them. Oh, no, not all the time, thank goodness! I know they’re gone, I know that, but sometimes -- I’ll wake up and the ceiling is too low and I can feel them, crawling. It doesn’t matter how well I know that they’re not there, I have to get up and, and take another bath and go over every inch with the comb, two or three times maybe.”

“Sometimes when I hear the guns that aren’t there, I crawl under the bed. Like I used to get under the lorry if I couldn’t drive out of a hot zone.” Crowley’s heart hurt at the way Angel looked at him, wide worried eyes. “I wasn’t, I never meant to hide this from you. Never had any of it - hardly any of it - in the hospital, or on the ship, or at the demobbing station, or any of the places we went round to this summer. It only started at the beginning of term. When we didn’t see each other every day anymore. I decided not to tell you because - I can handle it. Most of the time. And you were doing so well.” He sighed. “I thought you were doing so well.”

“I didn’t want to say anything,” Angel admitted. “Because you were doing so well. I know how you worry about me, and, and there isn’t anything you can do.”

“You are doing well, though,” said Crowley. “Even with all this. No, look at you! You are! You’ve got your flesh back, you’re managing property, you’re making new friends, you stood up to your family for Mildred, you’re translating things left and right -“

“None of those translations have anything to do with my courses,” said Aziraphale. “I can’t listen to anything the lecturers say. I can’t, I can’t do the reading.”

“You? Can’t do the reading? What are you talking about?”

“Obviously, I can read but - not the reading I’m supposed to do. This term it’s all about, about kings and successions and wars and church wrangling and and and none of it matters. None of it will help me translate my book. None of it will help me understand the people - the friars and the housewives and the nuns and the farmers and the poets, the people underneath the history. None of that is what I’m supposed to be thinking about this term and it’s what I care about. It’s what the monks who wrote my book cared about. Even through my great-great-uncle’s translation, you can feel that they told stories about the Angel Aziraphale and the Serpent to say important things about real people. Ordinary, imperfect people who didn’t get into the history books because they were too busy living their ordinary, imperfect lives. And when I try to read what I’m supposed to read, I find myself thinking about them, instead, and none of the wars and successions and doctrinal quarrels make it into my brain at all.”

“Oh.” Crowley wanted to take Aziraphale’s hands. He shoved his hands into his pockets, instead. “So. The question is, then, how to convince the examiners that you learned the things they wanted you to learn.”

“I don’t think I can,” said Angel. “I think I’m going to fail my examinations.”  He stopped wringing his hands, and some heaviness went out of his face. “I think...I think I’m not ever going to be a don.”

--
Aziraphale and Lord Auldmon had been in the library for a long time. Crowley and Josh paced  the corridor, shadowed by a spaniel with brown ears. “It shouldn’t be a problem,” said Crowley. “Angel’s a grown man. If he says he’s not going to be a don that’s the end of it. How can that not be the end of it?”

“Pater’s had his heart set on it forever,” said the Lamb. “It was Mum’s idea, you see. Not that I remember it, but I’ve been told. You’ve got to admit, it’d be the perfect job for him.”

“Aziraphale’s the one who gets to decide what his perfect job is!” Crowley scowled down at the spaniel, who wagged her tail hopefully. “He’s doing the Estate a favor, when you think about it. Turn what would have gone for university fees over to the bank instead, pay off the Soho mortgage in no time. From the Estate side, it’s nothing but benefits.”

“Maybe that’s what they’re talking about,” said the Lamb. “The benefits and practical details.” He knelt down to scratch the spaniel’s ears, and she immediately flopped over for a belly rub.

The house was abnormally quiet, for Christmas. The normal pool of houseguests, extended family and people leftover from Lord Auldmon’s time in the Army, was still gathering itself back together in the wake of the War and the Influenza, scattered from pillar to post around the Empire. Ruth was supposed to come in from Lancaster next morning, but she would stay with the Dr. Fells, who still included Janey and her children, because Sandy was still occupying Germany. Gabe had Christmas duties in Milltown to conduct before he came out. Commander Dick was at home for once, and Mickey had just produced a second son, so they would all be spending their Christmas with his family in London; she had not been a Christmas regular since before the War. With snow coming down outside, the loudest non-spaniel sound in the vicinity was the muttered running commentary that Mary, Mrs. Device’s slim black granddaughter and the Abbey’s youngest housemaid, could apparently not dust the drawing room without. (“Come down here, you cross thing! Why are cobwebs so stubborn! Whoops! Now I have to dust that picture frame again. Why are there so many pictures? Their eyes follow you around the room so, it’s creepy. Not you, Cavalier Michael, you’re ever so Byronic. It’s so sad you’re dead. Everybody in these pictures is dead. You’d think they’d want pictures of live ones sometimes but the dead ones take up so much room on the walls I suppose there’s no point.”). Whatever was going on in the library, at least no one was shouting. 

Not that Lord Auldmon ever had to shout, to make his children feel the full weight of his disapproval.

“Who’s a good girl, Feathers?” Joshua asked the spaniel. “Is it you? Is it you?” 

Crowley shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and pretended to look at the paintings in the corridor. They were mostly landscapes, mostly of places he didn’t recognize; but there was one of The Pond in summer, with less woodland around it than it had nowadays, and a grey heron fishing the reedy margins as the sun set. The Pond was sure to freeze this year, with no children to skate on it. No, dammit, Janey’s children were here. Could they skate? If they couldn’t, they would learn. He and Angel would teach them. “Aziraphale didn’t have to talk to him about it in person, at all. We could have stayed in town. Plenty to do there. It’s not anybody’s business.”

“It isn’t,” said Joshua. “But that’s not how it works for us. And you can’t blame Pater for being disappointed.”

“Oh, can’t I just?” Crowley wheeled and glared at a view of the Parthenon. “Maybe we will stay in town next year. Go to all of Mickey’s parties. Take Uriel and Angie to all the pantos. You could come up from Oxford, stay with Aziraphale, get a taste of your own properties.”

“What is your one oh? Green grow the rushes oh! One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so,” sang Mary in the drawing room, softly enough that she presumably thought no one could hear her. Mrs. Device couldn’t hear her, which was what mattered.

The library door opened. Josh stood, leaving the spaniel free to go wagging to Lord Auldmon as he came out, pale and grim. Aziraphale, behind him, smiled his falsest family smile. “Have you been waiting out here all this time?” Lord Auldmon stooped to pet the dog. “Surely you have better hosting skills than that, Lamb.”

“Pfft, like I was going anywhere with anybody,” said Crowley. “All right, Angel?”

“Of course I’m all right,” said Aziraphale, in a voice that was not all right at all. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

“You worry too much, Mr Crowley,” said Lord Auldmon. “You’ll make an invalid of yourself, if you don’t take hold. Excuse me, I have certain adjustments to make to next quarter’s budget, and I’d like to have all business out of the way by the time Bolt arrives. Enjoy yourselves, boys.”

Crowley took Aziraphale’s arm and drew him back into the library while Josh, rather than ring the bell, put his head into the drawing room to ask Mary to ask the kitchen to send up cocoa whenever it was convenient. The room was electrified, all the dark wood and plush and serried ranks of books - leather, boards, and dustcovers - invitingly lit, and a good steady fire on the hearth. A very Aziraphale room, when properly tended.

Aziraphale sat in the center of the sofa in front of the hearth and breathed, one hand holding Crowley’s, one hand holding Josh’s. “So,” he said. “So. It’s like this. I’m being completely unreasonable and not trying hard enough and, and Mum would be very disappointed. Obviously I do not have shell shock because I can move and speak and get bank loans and read everything except what I am supposed to read, which I am not reading out of perverse willfulness, which is surprisingly childish in a decorated veteran. But. He realizes he cannot stop me from destroying my own future and I will do what I want to because I am, am, am so stubborn there is no reasoning with me.”

Crowley hissed and squeezed his hand. Aziraphale squeezed back, a nice firm strong squeeze. 

“As for any arrangements I wish to make he has no desire to interfere. My allowance and manager salary will remain the same, as will the budget for maintaining the properties and paying off the mortgage. He is not opposed to my undertaking employment, though he would have thought learning the used book trade to be a bit beneath me. As for, as for undertaking to learn how to preserve and handle old manuscripts, I could have done that through Oxford and he doesn’t understand why I’m so determined to make things hard for myself.”

“This is all good, though, really,” said Josh. “You knew he wouldn’t like it and it’s not as if there was any chance of his being a good sport about it. Putting words in Mum’s mouth was a low blow, but he’s not trying to force you or cut you off or anything like we were afraid he would. And you should be able to take on the book much sooner than you would if you’d followed the original plan, because you’ll be able to focus on the important things. Once you do the translation and he sees it published he’ll forget he ever fought you about how to go about it. Why are you shaking your head?”

“He won’t ever see it,” said Aziraphale. “He promised me the book when he assumed it would have a role in my becoming a don. Now that this option is, is off the table, so to speak -“

“No,” said Josh, flatly. “He didn’t put conditions on it. He promised.” 

“He promised Mum that I would have the book when I grew up,” said Aziraphale. “He promised me I’d have it when I took my degree. Since I’m not taking a degree, he considers himself at liberty to decide for himself when I am grown up enough to take possession of it, and - since it is - you have to realize - Mum didn’t like the Abbey. She was a city woman at heart. You were much too little to remember, but she used to go up to London several times a year and come back all, all lit up, and the light would fade, bit by bit, until the next time she went up. But she did love the book. She spent far more time looking at it, and even showing me the pictures, than was good for the book, which is why it’s been under glass for so many years, so it wouldn’t fall apart completely. So the only thing on the entire Estate that Pater has, that gives him happy memories of her, is the book.”

“Which she wanted you to have!” 

“And I’ll have it. When he dies. Or I go back and finish the degree, so - when he dies.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Yes, it is. No, Lamb, listen. It’s all right. It’s how inheritance works. The Soho properties, the factories, the Estate  - nobody takes possession of anything until he dies.”

“That’s true enough,” admitted Crowley. “Doesn’t mean he’s not baiting you with it, but he’s entirely within his rights.”

Joshua dismissed legal reality with a wave of his hand. “You’re managing our properties now. Bolt’s managing the factories and participating in decisions about the Estate now. You were supposed to work on the book as soon as you got the skills to do it.”

“Yes, well, but from his point of view I was supposed to be a scholar, and the book was supposed to secure my reputation in academia. The disappointment won’t kill either of us. And don’t you go showing that glower to Pater, either! If fairness concerns you, I’m the only one of his children getting any sort of personal bequest. Every single thing he owns is part of the Estate as far as the will is concerned, right down to his favorite cufflinks. That’s hardly fair to you, Mickey, and Bolt, is it?”

“None of us want anything like you want the book, though!”

“Truly? Think about it, Josh. If you found out there was a clause in the will leaving ‘to my beloved son Raziel Joshua my favorite cufflinks -‘”

Joshua shook his head, blinking rapidly, but the angry flush faded. “That’s never going to happen. And I don’t need anything special from him. I don’t mind that you get it.”

“And I don’t mind if he wants to hold onto something that reminds him of Mum for as long as he can before he passes it on to me,” said Aziraphale. “Oh, Mary, goodness! Cocoa! How lovely!”

How much Mary had heard, there was no guessing. She set the tray down on the nearest occasional table and started talking, a little too loudly and rapidly, as if daring anyone to accuse her of hearing anything in her life. “Master Joshua asked for it, and it was all but ready, for Cook was sure you’d be wanting some, it being so cold today but the snow’s coming down ever so nicely and it’ll be a grand day tomorrow for those who have an indoors to go to after running about in it, and you didn’t mention biscuits but nobody thought you’d mind. Is there anything else, Master Aziraphale?”

“No, thank you, this is perfect.”

So that subject dropped, and the snow came down, and he read A Christmas Carol to them until teatime.

Chapter Text

The angel folded his wings and made himself appear in the likeness of a rock, upon which the Serpent stretched itself to lie basking in the sun, in the nick of time. “There you are,” said Beelzebub. “I have just come from Rome, where my flies have fattened themselves on the blood of martyrs killed in the coliseum for the amusement of the crowds, and the streets buzz with the bearing of false witness. Indeed you have done well and deserve to rest from your labors.” The Serpent appeared gratified and said: “Yes, I have labored long and hard to draw the Romans into iniquity, thank you for noticing. But is not that the Archangel Gabriel coming? Hurry back to Hell and I will distract him, for it is not suitable that he should smite a Prince of Hell, but I get smited so often it makes no difference to me, and I would like to taunt him with my success.” Beelzebub went upon his way.

The angel left off his imitation of a rock and spread his wings out in the sun, while the Serpent crept beneath his robe to wind itself about his calf. The Archangel Gabriel lighted down before Aziraphale and said: “There you are! I have come to congratulate you, for Christians crowd the gates of Heaven, singing the praises of Our Lord, and so touched are the people of Rome by their steadfast courage that many dare to hide their Christian neighbors, raise up their orphaned children in the faith of their martyred fathers, and lie to the servants of the Emperor who go abroad seeking new victims. Indeed you have done well, inspiring them all!”  Then Aziraphale bowed his head modestly and said: “It was nothing,” which was indeed no more than the truth, “it is always my pleasure to serve.” When the Archangel had flown off, the Serpent came out from under the angel’s robe, and they both looked down into the city of Rome, in which neither had set foot. The angel asked:“Shall we have more wine?” and the Serpent answered: “Yes, that is a good idea, for clearly Rome does not need us.”

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

Miss Murchison gave Crowley a stack of messages and a friendly smile. She was middle-aged, efficient, and new enough at the firm not to have accumulated the critical mass of nearly-guilty near-knowledge that made most of the secretarial staff tense most of the time. “Mr Prince wants to see you before your first appointment arrives.”

Crowley sighed. “I don’t suppose he told you what about?”

“No, sir. But he told me in person at the tea urn instead of using the whole formal rigamarole, of telling Belle to tell me to tell you, and he wasn’t scowling particularly, so it can’t be too bad.”

“All right. Anybody with him now?”

Receiving a reply in the negative, Crowley sauntered toward the corner office, where he had to stop and flirt with Miss Phegor, as if he hadn’t a care in the world, before being allowed through the door into the august, and augustly bored-looking, presence. “Miss Murchison said you wanted me, sir?”

“Miss Murchison exaggerates,” snapped Mr B Prince. “Close the door.” He checked that the intercom through which he communicated with Miss Phegor was turned off before tilting back in his chair, looking up at Crowley in the way that always made Crowley feel particularly looked down upon. His hair was suspiciously black for his age, the port wine stain had begun to sag a bit, and he looked dangerously bored as he asked: “So. Did you do it?”

“Do what, sir?” The answer was a reflex, followed immediately by comprehension. “No, I didn’t kill Joshua Fell! Why should I? And if I had a reason, would I be mad enough to do it without informing you and your father at the first possible moment? And if I were that mad, would there have been a body to sit an inquest on this morning? There’s so many fronts to be insulted on in that one question I don’t even know which one to be angry about!” The first flare of a tremor started in his hands, and he couldn’t smoke in here without being invited to; he clenched his fists and ended his angry gesture with his hands behind his back.

Mr B shrugged, expression not wavering from its anxiety-inducing ennui. “It’s best to be clear on these things. Or as clear as we can be. We both know, if the Old Man had told you to kill Joshua Fell, and let his body be found, and not tell me about it, you’d have said the exact same thing.”

“But why should he?”

“He’s always been funny about the Fell family. You wouldn’t be half the favorite you are, if he weren’t.”

“Yes, but that never made him stupid. If he wanted to kill a Fell I’d be the last person he called on for the deed.”

“Fair enough. The police have a tail on you.”

“I know. They say it’s a protective detail. Won’t say why they think I need one, but I hope it means they know why Josh died, which would be a good step forward to finding out who did it.”

“Do you care who did it?”

“Of course I do!” 

“Why?”

Crowley’s toes twitched with the need to pace, but he couldn’t pace in here. He coiled all his nervous energy up into his chest and forced himself to slouch on an outstretched arm against a filing cabinet, compressing the shakes between the weight of his shoulder and the wood of the cabinet. “You said it yourself: I wouldn’t be half the favorite I am with the Old Man if it weren’t for connecting with the Fells. If somebody’s decided to kill them off, and succeeds, where does that leave me? I have a lot invested in that family, and I can’t afford for it to die out.”

“What if the Old Man wants it to die out?”

Crowley’s heart lurched and his mouth went dry but he managed to say, with a faint echo of the boredom with which the question was posed: “Then he should have started working on it before Gabriel found a sucker to make an heir for him. Look here, did you call me in to play games, or to give orders? Because I’ve got four client meetings today and right this moment I don’t remember what a blessed one of ‘em’s about, including the one in fifteen minutes.”

Mr B sat up marginally straighter. “There’s too many policemen hovering too close to our business. They’ve been to your flat. They pulled in Ligur’s daughter. I heard a rumor that Froggy’s been flapping his gums. It’s Thursday already. If there’s no arrest by Saturday I want you to throw the police somebody.”

“What?!”

“The Old Man and I don’t care who killed the little bugger. We do care about coppers sniffing around their vicinity, which is also our vicinity. They need to go away.“

Crowley had thought he was beyond being surprised at anything the Princes wanted from him, but this was a stunner. “So, you want me to scoop some random crook off the street, plant some convincing evidence on him, and hand him off?”

“Since when do I care how you do things?” Mr B looked down at the papers on his desk. “Go prepare for your meetings. And take tomorrow and Saturday off. You’ll presumably need them. Good day.”

There seemed nothing to say but “Good day, sir;” nothing to do, but leave the office.

He got all the way back to his own office before the shaking overtook him uncontrollably.

--
Frederick Hastur looked less incongruous and shoddy, in the environs of the Yard, than he had in Mrs. Hostmassif’s elegant drawing room, but he was not a man who truly fit in anywhere - his height, his bewildered snarl, and his air of having had to dress himself without quite knowing how all conspired against him. How such a man had managed to raise up someone as cool and self-possessed as Miss Uriel Ligur was a question no amount of investigation, Frank suspected, would reveal. 

“What the devil do you mean, dragging my ward down here and badgering her?” Hastur demanded, without preliminary. “I ought to sue the department! It’s harassment!”

“And a very good day to you, too, sir,” said Inspector Lamb, opening his door and sweeping an arm. “Come in and we’ll discuss the question, shall we?”

Hastur found himself inside, with the door closed and a policeman on either side of him, before he knew what he was about. He had bluster to spare, though. “Well? What have you to say for yourselves?”

“As to that, Mr. Hastur, we could ask you the same thing,” said Lamb. “Sit down, sit down, make  yourself at home. Policemen don’t like it when people lie to them, and Miss Ligur’d done so, denying she’d ever met the deceased, so having her in seemed called for. I presume you didn’t know about the lie when you set us onto Crowley’s trail, or you’d never have directed us to the death of her father.”

“The murder of her father,” growled Hastur. “Crawly killed him, and the Fell boy, and you go picking on harmless girls!”

“The coroner’s jury was convinced that John Ligur’s death was an accident, and it’s of no concern to us here so far as I know. If you have information connecting that death to this one, or any information at all regarding the murder of Raziel Joshua Fell, it is your duty to stop beating about the bush and communicate it. Well?”

“Crawly did it!”

“Did you see him do it?”

“No!” Hastur fumbled in his coat pocket and brought out a cigarette and a book of matches. “It has to have been him, that’s all.” He lit the cigarette on the third try, and dropped the match into the waste bin. “He’s a snake, that one. Have you seen his flat? You don’t make that kind of money writing wills for little old ladies.” 

“I see. You have evidence of this?”

“Evidence! Like the police can’t find evidence if they really want to. I’m telling you where to look - go look! Do your job!”

The Inspector leaned back in his chair, regarding Hastur with benign interest. “Do you know where the gun is?” 

“Gun? No! How would I know?”

“Do you know why the murder took place on Westminster Bridge?”

“I s’pose it was handy. All that water.”

“What can you tell us about the motorbike?”

“It runs on two wheels and petrol, what else is there to know?”

“Do you know why Crowley would want to kill Joshua Fell?”

“Probably that angel of his, the great ponce, tidying an inconvenient little brother out of the way before the old man kicks off. Increasing his expectations. There isn’t anything Crawly wouldn’t do for Angel, and do it for free, too.” Hastur leaned forward, scattering ash across Inspector Lamb’s desk. “That Erich of his - he’s a perk. Crawly’s bosses pay him, not Crawly. You show him a fiver, tell him Crawly’s been working outside the firm, he’ll let you in to search the flat. Bet you’ll find the gun there, all right.”

I wonder if we would, Frank thought. If I were planting a gun on him, I’d plant it in the car. Easier to get into undetected.

“So if I’m understanding you correctly, you have no actual information to give us, but you want us to harass someone you dislike, taking your suspicions as evidence? There’s penalties for wasting police time, Mr Hastur. But I’ll let you off with a warning, if you answer me one question with a nice solid fact I can check up on.” Inspector Lamb leaned forward, too, brushing ash back off the desk into Hastur’s lap. “Where were you on the evening of November 5?” 

Hastur gaped at him, nearly losing his smoke, then leaned back in his chair and laughed a nasty, loose sort of laugh. Frank thought he might be getting a cold in his head. “Ask PC Tyler, why don’t you? He was the one taking notes for the accident report.”

“What accident report would that be?” Inspector Lamb asked, apparently unperturbed, though Frank would have laid odds that he had the same peculiar internal sensation that Frank did.

“Firework accident. In Hackney. I saw the whole thing, on my way to the pub. Around nine, nine-thirty it was, but they kept all those that saw it hanging about for ages. Some poor duffer got a bad lot of fireworks. Unstable, you know. Whole box went up as he was carrying them down the street to the bit of waste land he meant to set ‘em off in.” An even nastier laugh. “Terrible thing. Several incidental injuries of bystanders. The bloke was still alive when the ambulance took him off, but I don’t think his hands’re ever going to be much use to him again. Nor his eyes.”

“That hardly seems like a laughing matter to me.”

“Not for him, no, it wasn’t,” said Hastur. “But if you want an alibi for Fell, I’ve got a grand one, because I was talking to a cop on the other side of town when the deceased met his end, wasn’t I?” His chair squealed on the linoleum as he pushed it back and rose, scattering ash on the floor. “If you won’t listen to me, that’s your lookout. But stop picking on Ligur’s little girl or I’ll have your badge, and don’t imagine I can’t. I may not look like much, but I know people.”

Inspector Lamb waited until the door closed behind him. “Abbot -“

Frank had already picked up the telephone to call the Hackney branch. Lamb did paperwork - there was always paperwork waiting to fill any idle moment, at the Yard - while he asked his questions and took down answers and offered a tidbit of information of his own. When he was done, he set down the receiver and shook his head. “What an appallingly stupid man.”

“Did he just alibi himself for one murder by placing himself on site for a different one?” Lamb sounded almost as stunned as he had been by Aziraphale’s gift of cake to burglars.

“It looks that way. One he was about to get away with unchallenged, too, for the constables on the scene have been calling it an accident, but now I’ve tipped them they’ll be taking a closer look at who had access to that box of fireworks, and who the victim might have angry at him.” Frank swivelled his chair. “Sir?”

“Don’t sit there ‘sirring’ me. Say what you want to say.”

“I haven’t found anything promising in the files you gave me about associates Hastur might have trusted in a conspiracy to kill Joshua Fell. But connections to the Prince Foundation keep popping up. Pretty tenuous, sometimes, but once I noticed I started digging a bit and they’re everywhere. Somebody close to an ‘accident’ victim keeps his money in the bank connected to the Foundation; or the victim was slated to testify against a relative of a Prince and Prince client. One was a partner in a stockbroking firm bought out shortly afterward by a brokerage that contributes largely to the Prince Foundation. It’s a big Foundation, but still. After Ligur died, Hastur fired Crowley from looking after Uriel’s interests, but he stuck with Prince and Prince, and he’s suspected of causing accidents professionally at someone’s direction. And - I had a conversation with Crowley after the inquest.”

Lamb listened closely, looking skeptical, while Frank repeated the substance of that conversation. “You think the entire Prince Foundation setup is a criminal front and Hastur’s trying, very stupidly, to get rid of, what? A rival hired executioner? A handler he doesn’t like?”

Frank shrugged. “I think Crowley is very close to ready to turn state’s evidence against the hand that feeds him and that whoever’s working on the Hastur problem should have a conversation with him. But I also think he’s right, that for this case it’s a red herring. If Hastur’s got an alibi -“

“Someone who identified himself as Hastur has an alibi -“

“All right, but is even he stupid enough to set up an alibi like that one deliberately? And if Crowley’s right and the Princes aren’t part of this - ” He took a deep breath. Opposing a superior officer’s preferred theory was not something he’d done out loud before - but he’d be a rotten detective if he didn’t have the nerve for it, and he wasn’t, he was a good detective and he knew what he was talking about. “I don’t think Hastur and Miss Ligur are in it, either. I think the clue we need is in Lancashire.”

--
Aziraphale and Magdala were surprisingly productive, after they had cried together over The Exercise Book of the Angel Aziraphale, and he’d read bits aloud to her, and they’d remembered for each other a dozen happy Joshua stories. Mildred Grimsby arrived in a timely manner, just as they were beginning to feel how little they’d been able to eat at breakfast, bearing a hamper of lunch offerings and the information that the ladies of the neighborhood had been organized by Mrs Potts, so that they wouldn’t have to trouble themselves to cook or worry about mealtimes until after the funeral Saturday afternoon. She helped them finish organizing the notes and parcels, took charge of the cash offerings herself, tactfully conveyed the willingness of certain tenants to supply a minyan, if wanted, and was generally the stalwart sensible friend Aziraphale had always found her to be. 

“It is sadly ridiculous,” he told her, “but several times during the past days I have found myself talking to Grimsby, asking him to please look after the Lamb in the afterlife.”

“He wouldn’t need any prompting, you know,” said Mildred. “Though Josh is a good bit older than, than John ever got to be.”

“Yes, but John knows the ropes in the afterlife by now,” said Aziraphale, and was suddenly, sharply struck by a memory. “I used to do the same thing, in the War - I did it for Grimsby particularly, but I did it in a, a kind of wholesale way after every action - asking my mother to take care of my casualties for me. Apparently I’m really a Catholic, at heart. When I was small Mum got all mixed up in my mind, and the Lamb’s too I think, with the Virgin Mary, so I suppose I’m making crude intercessionary prayers.”

“My John wasn’t any saint, though,” Mildred reminded him, with a rueful smile.

“We wouldn’t have loved him so much if he had been.”

The telephone rang. Magdala, at the desk struggling to write to her parents - a necessity she had completely forgotten until she received the offer of the minyan - looked up and held her hand tentatively over the receiver. “Should I -“

Aziraphale heaved himself to his feet (he seemed much, much heavier this week than he normally did; normally he never felt his weight at all, noticing it only with the satisfaction of one who has in the past been too thin), shaking his head. “No, no, I’ll get it. Excuse me. A.Z. Fell, Rare and Unusual Books, we are closed for at least the rest of the week.”

“I should hope so,” said Anathema. “Sorry to bother you, but I didn’t want to stand there banging on your door. Are you getting terribly many calls?” Someone else spoke in the background, but with the distortion of distance and the telephone wire, he couldn’t tell who it was. Mrs Potts, probably, the dear.

“No, actually, this is the first time the telephone’s rung today.” Aziraphale relaxed, and mouthed “Anathema” to Magdala’s querying eyes. “Presumably it rang most of the time I was at Crowley’s  and the reporters have given up on it. His certainly rang often enough, and not once was it anybody Erich felt any need to ask if we wanted to take a call from. You have not been terribly pestered, I hope?”

“I was at the theater most of the day today. Are you and Mags up to seeing anybody?”

“That would depend on who it is. Mildred’s with us now, and of course you would not be disturbing us.”

“It would be me and one other. And I think you need to hear what she has to say, but - it won’t make you happy, and it doesn’t have to be right now.”

“My dear, nothing will make us happy today. I’ve never known bad news to get better for waiting. But who is it?”

“You remember my cousin Mary Hodges?”

“Yes, of course. She’s been housemaid at the Abbey since the War.” A much more loquacious housemaid than would have been acceptable before the War, but a cheerful busy presence in the gloomy pile his childhood home had become, which for his money covered a multitude of small improprieties. Anxiety hitched in his chest, as he realized who the voice in the background belonged to. “Has anything happened? Is she all right?”

“For a certain value of all right. She’s been - well, she wants to tell you, herself.”

“Then bring her here, by all means. I’ll put the kettle on and unlock the door.”

Mildred was on her feet and filling the kettle even as he hung up. “Shall I go?” She asked. 

“You may if you like,” said Aziraphale, hoping she wouldn’t. “I don’t wish to keep you from your business. But I can’t imagine what a housemaid could have to say that you couldn’t hear, and you always have such good advice. If - no, it can’t be Pater, or Uncle Matt would have called long before Mary could get here. And you are a great comfort to have around in a crisis, you know.”

So Mildred put the kettle on, Magdala put aside her difficult letter, and Aziraphale let Anathema and Mary in. Mary looked older than he remembered - a function, no doubt, of how long he’d been avoiding going home to a place which hadn’t felt like home in years - but she was otherwise just as he would have expected, neat and respectable, in a good businesslike tweed and a sensible hat, and as voluble as ever, taking the opportunity of her introduction to Magdala to pour out the sympathy of the whole household, “everybody so upset, and that Mrs Jane crying her eyes out all day and all night, you’d think he was her own brother, but he always was kinder to her than her husband is and a mercy he isn’t there for he’d have tried to shut her up and it’s dreadfully bad for people, I always think, to swallow tears, brings on the dyspepsia and headaches, and heaven knows, the poor thing has enough to cry about, waiting on his lordship hand and foot all the time and no call for it, either, for there isn’t one of us, that was trained by Granny Device at least, that can’t be trusted in a sickroom, but Dr Fell is that particular and wouldn’t let me so much as bring the tray in, says the old man’s half dead with the news and what I say is, wouldn’t you rather, if you was half dead, have a nice quiet housemaid bring the tray in than see your own niece by marriage blubbing as she goes in and out with them?” 

At this juncture she accepted a seat and took a breath long enough for Anathema to say: “Of course the place started going downhill when Granny died and Lord Auldmon let Master Gabriel hire that stranger from Cheshire. That’s old news. What Mary’s got to tell you is - it’s got implications.”

“I am all attention,” said Aziraphale, composing himself into his most alert posture, as Mildred poured.

“I wish I’d told you when it happened,” said Mary, accepting her cup and holding it in a tolerable imitation of the women she’d served countless times over the years. “But Master Gabriel was that cross and talking American and if he’d fired me I didn’t know what I would do, but now that he’s been and gone and done it I knew exactly what to do and that was to come and tell you all about it because I’ve had a bad conscience from that day to this and I don’t know but what it was a relief to be let go, only it’s a crime, it is, to be given no references at all after so many years.”

“Let go? But -“ Pater never fired staff. He hired exclusively from the village except for the most skilled positions, because villagers were his responsibility, and if they didn’t suit in one position another would be found for them.“What happened?”

“Well, you see, Tuesday is my afternoon out and a woman was coming round the village asking about Master Lamb, which I hadn’t heard then as he had passed on, not being in the house when Master Gabriel called to break the news, and of course I had nothing but good things to say about him for he was always a very considerate gentleman, when he came home, which wasn’t so often, I thought, that Dr Fell should be quite so firm about turning him away, and his lordship probably would have been ever so cheered up to see him any time these five years; only when he did get in on Monday it all went wrong and very troubling we all found it in the hall, for it isn’t right for children and parents to quarrel with each other and with his lordship so ill, too, that any meeting might be the last, and I told her all about it before I knew what I was doing, and then she told me about how it was his last and I was that shocked, I burst into tears and had palpitations, for it’s the pitifulest thing I ever heard tell of and here it was right in my own house, so to speak, though of course it’s his lordship’s house but I’ve lived there so long, ever since I was old enough to go into service; but when it all got printed in the paper Dr Fell comes down to the hall all up on his high horse - you know how he can get, him and Master Sandy as like as two peas when it comes to temper - and demanded to know who had been talking and everybody looked at me, though I’m sure I don’t know why for anyone can tell you I’m not a gossip and it might have been any one of us, but I was the only one who had that afternoon out and in any case I’ve always been truthful as the day is long so I said as how I hadn’t meant any harm and didn’t know Master Lamb was dead or there was anything in what I said to interest the papers but I was right sorry, and he gave me such a tongue lashing and told me to get my things and get out, no two week notice or anything, and I gave him a piece of my mind about how the Abbey is no sort of place to work anymore anyway, so much work for so few, everything so gloomy you might as well be working in a tomb, and even without that you couldn’t pay me enough to be glared at and called names that I wouldn’t repeat for worlds and I took my pay and I went and I hadn’t even gotten out the door when I remembered the last time anyone talked about sacking me and what else could Master Lamb have gotten into such a state about I ask you, when I heard them being angry in the library my own self that day, so I went to the station and asked about trains and then I called Anathema and told her all about it and she said to come down and tell you what I knew.” She paused for breath and a sip of tea.

Magdala and Mildred looked a little stunned as well as apprehensive, but this was not the first time Aziraphale had dealt with Mary desiring to communicate something. He smiled encouragingly and asked: “And what do you know, my dear?”

She leaned forward, a sign that she was getting to the meat of the issue at last. “It was a few months ago, along about midsummer, I remember because I didn’t have to have the lights on to dust the library, and there was no fire, but of course the library is a big job of dusting at the best of times, so I only do it once a month and right sorry I am about that, too, for dust is no good for a book, but it’s only me doing it these days so there’s no help for it, and I always give it the whole day so I can do a right good job of it so I went in first thing in the morning and everything seemed normal but as it was getting toward lunchtime I finally got to the case with your book in it, which I always keep as a little treat for myself right before I take a break because it’s so nice to look at, that pretty blue Virgin Mary that they say is so like your mother and all the bright colors and the funny angel dressed up like a girl and the cunning little snakes all over the page, so I went to polish the glass and it wasn’t there!”

Aziraphale blinked at her. “Wasn’t there? Where was it?”

“Nowhere!” She set down her teacup specially so that she could throw up her hands, expressive of shock and surprise. “The case was empty and you could see where the book had been by the shape of it where the felt had faded all around it but the case was unlatched and the book was nowhere. So of course I thought there had been thieves and I started to run down to the hall to report it, but I nearly ran into Master Gabriel passing by in the corridor and I couldn’t see waiting to tell news so dreadful when he was right there and the telephone for calling the police not ten feet away, not that Ernie Shadwell would be able to handle a robbery like that but he’s good enough to call Scotland Yard in I reckon, so I blurted out that the Abbey’d been robbed and he stopped and turned all pale and asked what I meant and what was missing, so I said: ‘Master Aziraphale’s angel book, it’s not in its case, and I haven’t noticed anything else yet but we’ll have to turn the place out’ and before I could say anything more he got calm again and went very American like he does and said, ‘No, Mary, calm down, it’s not robbed at all, it’s sold!’” 

Aziraphale felt as if his body had gone down in a lift, and left his head behind. “Sold? But - but Pater wouldn’t -“

“That’s exactly what I said,” agreed Mary triumphantly, “only of course I didn’t call him that, I said, ‘But that’s Master Aziraphale’s book, his lordship wouldn’t sell it,’ and Master Gabriel looked all the way down his nose at me, which is a pretty far piece as you know, and said, ‘It was Lord Auldmon’s book, to keep or sell as he chose, and he got a very good offer for it, and chose to sell it, not that it’s any business of yours, so now that we’ve shipped it off it belongs to the buyer and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll say no more about it, especially not to Master Sunshine if he ever condescends to set foot in the house again -‘ Begging your pardon, for those are his words not mine and I thought he was rude at the time but of course I couldn’t say so, but everyone knows it was your mother’s book and you loved it so and it was supposed to be yours in the will since you wound up not being a don and he didn’t want to let you have it before he was dead because it was all he had of your poor mother, which is the most romantic thing that ever was in that house if you’ll excuse my saying so, so I started to say something about it, but he said he meant it, he’d fire me out of hand and make sure no one in three counties would hire me ever again, too, which I don’t know if he could or even would really for that sounds like a deal of work, blackening somebody’s name to everybody in three counties, you wouldn’t think it was worth his while, but you know how it is, when you’re talking to him, he makes you feel that small and like he can do anything he likes and you not able to lift a finger about it, and it was true enough it wasn’t my place to tell the family what they could and couldn’t do, but I fair couldn’t fathom that his lordship would do such a thing, no matter how sick he was, and now here I am with no job anyway and that empty case that they took away to the attic the very next day burning a hole in my mind, as you might say, so here I am and I wish I’d told you as soon as it happened, so I do! Oh, dear, Master Aziraphale, mind - you’re spilling your tea all everywhere -“

Her voice merged with the buzzing in his ears. He smelled trench mud, which was ridiculous. With a great effort he managed a grateful murmur as Mildred took his teacup and Magdala dried spilled tea off his hands with a napkin, his hands that were shaking, which was, again, ridiculous. Crowley’s hands shook, not his. And not about not about not about books. About Joshua, yes, about the War, yes, about the stranglehold the Princes had on their lives, yes, but not about about about about a book.

But it wasn’t just a book. It was the book. It was his book and his mother’s love, and the Lamb’s too, and Pater’s promise -

Oh. Oh, no wonder he was shaking. This was the ultimate authority, the fount of all truth and morality a la Fell, selling its faith and its word and and the only tangible evidence that love had existed in any Fell marriage, for -

 - well, presumably for cash. 

For cash, no doubt, that the Estate desperately needed to support all those who relied on it, to maintain Fiver’s inheritance, to to to spend in ways that were no doubt necessary but but but -

“He got an offer,” said a high cracked voice that was somehow coming out of his own throat, choking on the smell of cordite and trench mud,“he got an offer and he didn’t didn’t didn’t even ask, didn’t offer me first refusal, didn’t try to find out if I would have been willing to to to to make a counter offer. For my my my birthright. Was it my birthright? Not, no, I must be fair, not exactly, it was a promise but - not even a promise to me, a promise to Mum -“

Somebody blocked his path.  He seemed to be pacing. He’d better stop that, or he’d knock somebody down. Somebody took his hands - firm hands, but small, not Crowley’s hands at all, he needed Crowley, but Mildred said: “Angel,” in a voice through which Grimsby reached out to him, dear cheerful loyal Grimsby, right there when Crowley couldn’t be and all God’s blessings on him. “There’s no fair here, Angel,” said Mildred, as if she were talking to Angie, who was grown now, working for her mother’s accounting firm three days a week and taking art classes three days and dating accountants and artists, alternately. “You’ve been robbed. On top of your brother being murdered, you’ve been robbed. By your own family. You’re allowed to be upset.”

“If Joshua were here, he would be beyond upset,” said Magdala, very far away, but coming closer as the cordite and mud smells began to fade. “He would be raging. This is the quarrel with the Pater, not me. It must be. He goes into the library, the case is missing, he is told his brother’s so-special book is sold in secret, he is too angry to let the door stay closed between him and his father. But his father is too sick to fight with, too sick even to tell about me, when Joshua is so angry, so - he goes to drive his fury away. Because he is too angry to think straight, to tell about me and make everything worse.”

The world was in focus again. It still looked peculiar, the distances somehow wrong, but Aziraphale could see: his back room, dim with the dimness of a city winter; Mildred and Magdala, Anathema and Mary all looking at him as if he were a bomb they weren’t certain wasn’t armed.“Bolt and Sandy are lying to the police,” he said. “They claim not to know what the quarrel was about. Probably because they think it matters more for me not to know what Pater did, than for the police to know all the facts.”

“Are you sure it’s your father who did it?” Anathema asked. Everyone looked at her. “Surely it’s occurred to you before. If he’s too sick to see people, isn’t he too sick to deal with business affairs? Doesn’t Gabriel, or Dr Fell, have his power of attorney? And who, outside the family, even knew enough about the book to make an offer? Nobody came to evaluate it. The servants would know, if they had.”

“You make excellent points,” said Aziraphale. “Let’s ask Gabriel, shall we?” He picked up the telephone receiver, checked the list of important numbers taped inside a pigeonhole, and asked the exchange to ring Gabriel’s town house. The footman picked up promptly; a little less promptly, Gabriel said: “Thanks a lot for siccing the reporters on us and ditching us after the inquest, Sunshine.”

There were days when this would have wrongfooted him. Today was not among them. “Did you really expect a good honest woman like Mary Hodges to keep your secret forever? Who bought my book, for how much, how did they even know the book existed, and why wasn’t I given first refusal?”

“Hold on,” said Gabriel, at maximum American. “Hold on hold on hold on. The Lamb isn’t even in the ground yet and you’re bitching to me about that stupid book?”

Aziraphale’s mouth went dry but he pressed on. “You lied to the police about it, so yes, I am!” 

“The police never asked me about the book!”

“They asked you what Joshua was in such a temper about when he left and you said you didn’t know.”

“I don’t!”

“High words in the library, Josh storming into Pater’s room and coming out so angry he left at once - what else could it have been?”

“That’s got nothing to do with who killed him!”

“The police could be working any number of theories based on any number of possible quarrels right now, leading them off in any number of wrong directions. Whereas if you had told them they could have contacted the buyer, asked a few questions, and closed off a dead end on Tuesday. If it is a dead end. For all we know Pater gave him the name and direction and he went straight to some shady collector who lives near Westminster Bridge. Which brings us back around to the question: Who bought it and how much did he pay?” He drew breath, thinking he was done, and heard himself add, in a high, strangled voice: “What was the price of my mother’s memory?”

He heard movement on the other end of the line, Sandy saying something he couldn’t make out over the scraping of a chair. “Five. Thousand. Pounds.” Gabriel dropped each word through the telephone line, like dropping boulders from a height. “For a stupid book nobody could even touch, let alone read. That there’s two readable copies of. Only an idiot would have said no.”

Aziraphale made eye contact with Mildred and said, keeping his voice (he thought) admirably steady: “Five thousand pounds.” Mary Hodges squeaked; Anathema’s eyebrows went up; Magdala looked puzzled and apprehensive. “All right. I know the Estate’s in trouble -“

“It’s not in trouble, it’s -“

“I didn’t realize it was desperate enough to sell Pater’s honor, but, if somebody had had the common courtesy to call and lay the position out for me at the time, I could have could have gone to -“ Mildred, with her calculating face on, held up six fingers - “six, if that was what it took to secure the only part of my inheritance I ever cared about.”

“It’s not your inheritance and you didn’t have six thousand pounds!”

“Pater promised my mother, and then he promised me, that it would be mine, and I may not have six thousand pounds but I’ve been in debt on behalf of my inheritance before now. What on earth made you think I wouldn’t do it again?”

Sandy in the background. “Oh, now, don’t blame this on me,” said Gabriel. “I don’t make the calls about the Estate. The Old Man got the offer, the Old Man accepted the offer. I wasn’t about to argue with him about it.”

Of course you weren’t. The book meant nothing to you; your stepmother meant nothing to you; certainly not in comparison to five thousand pounds. Would you have argued, if the promise being broken had been made to Mickey? To Ruth, or Phaela, or Fiver? Aziraphale ignored these side roads. “Very well, I will speak to Pater about it, then. But that can be put off, if you’ll tell me who has the book now.”

“I don’t know! Some solicitor, acting on behalf of a third party. And don’t you dare go home and badger the Old Man about this! Uncle Matt won’t let you in, anyway.”

“I’d like to see him stop me. He didn’t weigh above nine stone the last time I saw him, and I doubt he’s gotten any heartier. Never mind, tell me the name of the solicitor. I’ll find out for myself.”

“I don’t remember! I tell you it had nothing to do with me!” Gabriel was truly deeply madly angry now, the American affectation sloughing off to reveal Lancashire vowels underneath, his voice loud enough Aziraphale had to hold the receiver away from his ear. “Leave it alone, if you know what’s good for you!”

“I’ll be the judge of what’s good for me,” said Aziraphale. “Out of curiosity, what did the Estate need the five thousand pounds for? What work is underway?”

“None of your damn business!” The receiver at the other end crashed down, and the disconnected line signal whined in his ear.

“That went well,” said Anathema. “Would you really knock Dr. Fell over to get in to your father?”

“I wouldn’t have to,” said Aziraphale absently, depressing the cradle. “It’s simply a matter of moving him gently to one side. Am I, in fact, in position to manage a six thousand pound loan?”

“Mmm,” said Mildred. “Probably. But when you find out who the buyer is, let Crowley or me negotiate.”

The operator picked up and he gave her Mickey’s number. “That goes without saying! Ah, Uriel, good evening - goodness, you sound dreadful. What’s the matter, my dear?”

“Oh, Uncle Froggy’s being an idiot,” said Uriel. “He thinks he’s protecting me, but all he’s going to do is - oh, never mind, we’ll deal with it.”

“I strongly suggest that you not act without consulting your - my sister, whatever’s going on,” said Aziraphale, remembering in the nick of time that he and Mildred were the only ones in the room aware that Mickey had a daughter. Mildred signaled to him; he nodded and added: “And you can always go to the Grimsbys, if things get too messy. You can rely on their goodwill. Not that you want my advice, as I’m aware. May I speak to my sister, please?”

“Yes, she’s in the next room trying to pound sense into somebody’s head. It may be a moment.”

He twisted the telephone cord as he waited and Mary Hodges started talking again, no doubt on some related subject, but he could not hear her, being too busy wracking his brains to think who the buyer might be. The thing was, though he dealt only incidentally even in incunabula, let alone anything older than Gutenberg, his years of gathering the knowledge he’d need in order to handle, translate, and curate his book when it finally came to him had him moving in such circles that he knew, either personally or by reputation, every legitimate buyer for every legitimate market for illuminated manuscripts in Great Britain, as well as a few from America and the Continent, and a few illegitimate ones, too. Take them all together, it was not a large market, or a lively one, comprised of highly reputable institutions and highly specialized private collectors. He had certainly mentioned his book to a number of people, both in the trade and during his time at Oxford, and several of them had exhibited interest in it. But he knew of no one since his mother’s death who had ever been allowed to remove it from the case and examine it personally - and absolutely no one in their senses would offer five thousand pounds, or one thousand, or one hundred, or ten, for an obscure manuscript from a minor abbey, curated entirely by amateurs for centuries, sight unseen. He was so deep in his mental review of faces, names, and rumors that he started when Mickey finally picked up the other end and said: “Sunshine? What’s the matter now?”

No point beating around the bush. “Were you aware that my book’s been sold?”

“I should hope you sell one occasionally, or why have a bookshop?” She snapped that out as if on reflex, and before he could reply caught her breath. “Wait, you mean - your book? The angel book? Pater wouldn’t sell that. He promised it to you.”

“I know, that’s what I thought. But he has. This past summer. For five thousand pounds.”

“Five thou -“ Mickey interrupted herself to say several words Aziraphale hadn’t been aware she knew; but after all, she was married to a sailor. “So that’s where he got - Listen. This summer Bolt made some big investments that were supposed to pay off spectacularly if he held off selling till the end of the year. I wondered at the time how he managed when he’s been claiming for three years he didn’t have enough to do more than basic maintenance on the factories, but he was sure this would, as he said, ‘Fix everything,’ even though he also insists nothing needs to be fixed. One of them failed in September and another one’s crashed this week - the venture’s gone bankrupt, as I warned him at the time was all too probable. So - if Pater sold your book for five thousand pounds - and gave it to Bolt to piss it away on the market - But, no; no, Pater wouldn’t do that.”

“I wouldn’t have thought he would, either,” said Aziraphale. “I’m still having trouble believing it. And then - for Gabriel and Sandy to lie about it, to keep it secret from all of us, even to lie to the police -“

“To the police? Oh, God, yes! The Lamb’d be livid! That has to be what he was so angry about, angry enough to leave without doing what he meant to do!”

“Exactly! And I’m wondering - do you think, perhaps, Uncle Matt and Gabriel, might be -“

“Influencing Pater? Bringing pressure on him?” Mickey sounded grim. “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. I’ll go up tomorrow. Can I go up tomorrow? What time’s the funeral again?”

“Three-thirty Saturday. Yes, I need to see him too, but -“

“Go,” said Magdala. “I have so many people, I’ll be fine. You have plenty of time. Especially the way Crowley drives.”

“Yes, but Crowley’s -“

“If Crowley can’t take you I can,” interrupted Mickey, “which is a really cheap offer for me to make. We all know he’d do more than take another day off work to keep you from having to take the train. But keep him in check at the actual bedside, please! Whatever’s going on, Pater’s still old and sick and grieving - if they’ve even told him by then that the Lamb is dead.”

“Oh, they must have!”

“If they’re pressuring him into breaking his word there’s no telling what else they’re doing. Ruth’ll be home tonight, though - she’ll tell him. Did you know Bolt sent Ruth and the children to the Abbey right after the inquest?”

“What? No! She didn’t say anything about it at lunch yesterday.”

“She didn’t know then. Bolt sprang it on her when she came home, apparently. Fired the governess and sent them all off north. That’s why she wasn’t at the inquest. If he’s going to do that he needs to sublet the Kensington house - he never could afford the damn thing. Dammit, he’s been hemorrhaging money for so long and I’ve just stood by but this, no, this is the last straw. I’ll have him up in court if I have to, but I’m not standing for this. Whatever it is, I’m not standing for it.”

“Breathe, dear. It may not be so bad.”

“No. It might be worse! I’m mad at Ruth, too - I’m mad at all of them -“

“Now, be fair. You know Gabriel never tells Ruth anything. And we’re to blame, too. We should never have let things get so bad; we should have insisted on seeing Pater -”

“I don’t have to be fair, I just have to be right and I am! Pick a side, Sunshine, you can’t waffle and make excuses and keep in good with everybody this time!”

Aziraphale closed his eyes. “We will see where we stand after we talk to Pater, all right?”

Chapter Text

The angel’s hands were so warm that the snow melted away, and there he found the Serpent of Eden, frozen as stiff as a poker, with its scales all glistening in ice. Though he reminded himself of the Temptation of Eve and all the sins of man, Aziraphale could not behold this without being moved to pity, and he tenderly raised the Serpent, and folded it into his bosom, and went along his way. Soon the warmth of his bosom melted the ice into steam. The Serpent writhed and, finding itself closed fast in the dark, sank its envenomed fangs into the flesh that warmed it. The angel cried out in pain as the fangs pierced and the venom burned. When it heard a voice it knew, the Serpent’s heart was wrung with regret, so that it sucked the venom back into its mouth, withdrew its fangs, and poked its head out of the folds of the angel’s robe, exclaiming: “You idiot, why did you warm me in your bosom, when you know it is my nature to do harm?” Whereupon the angel passed his healing hand over the wound and said: “I pray you, do not speak so loud, lest our masters hear you. If it is your nature to do harm, yet you cannot long harm me, for behold, you have left no mark and the pain is gone. Mostly. And is it not my nature to show mercy? Besides, you stopped as soon as you knew me; it was fear, not you, that bit me.”

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

Aziraphale had his pick of vacancies, and selected a unit with a stove and a sink on the fourth floor of one of the buildings flanking the corner building and backing onto the court. Lesley borrowed a mate’s lorry to bring down bits and bobs of furniture retrieved from the Abbey’s attic - a Victorian bedstead, two chairs dating probably from the reign of Queen Anne, a plain table of no particular era, a hip bath, and assorted bookshelves. Crowley had purchased a pre-War Morris, which carried books, clothing, linen, and china up from Oxford on a slushy, foggy, discouraging day in early January. 

They parked in the court, lorry and Morris side by side, and Crowley ran up with the key while Aziraphale and Lesley unloaded the bedstead. He was at the top and they were at the bottom when a door opened on the second floor landing and woman looked out - a smallish, aging woman, with her hair in curlers, wrapped in an improbably-colored quilted garment, who watched them coming up with concern. “They’ve never gone and rented that miserable den on the top floor,” she said. 

“Technically, no,” answered Aziraphale, in the rear bearing the brunt of the weight of the headboard while Lesley guided at the front. “I’m the manager for the landlord, you see, and I’m not paying rent. It should be slightly less miserable after the work I’ve scheduled gets done. Lovely to meet you, madam.”

“You’re Mr. Fell, dearie? You don’t look at all like I imagined you. Everybody said you were ever so posh.”

“Oh, he is,” Crowley called down, “when he’s not dressed down to haul furniture. Oi, I’m not sure we can get that headboard through this door - it’s so tall and so broad, and the landing and the door are neither.”

“It’ll be a matter of angles,” said Lesley.

The woman retreated into her flat as they went by, then came out again to watch their progress, and when it became clear that they needed a steadying fourth point of contact to accomplish the entrance of the headboard, came up and provided it. “You’ll freeze half to death up here,” she said. “Though I see you’ve had a glazier in about the window.”

“It won’t be worse than a trench in winter,” said Aziraphale cheerily, “and I reckon the more of the situation’s privations I suffer, the better I’ll be able to direct the builders when I make improvements. Ah, we’ve done it! Bravo! Everything after this’ll be a doddle. Thank you so much for lending a hand, Mrs -“

She blinked at her first exposure to an angelic smile, and smiled back. She was no slouch in that department, herself. “Potts,” she said. “Marjorie Potts.”

“Aziraphale Fell,” he said, shaking her hand, “and this is my dear friend Mr Crowley, and my father’s very valuable chauffeur Mr Lesley, and all delighted to meet you. I’m afraid we’ll be tramping up and down past your door making quite a lot of noise this afternoon.”

“I’ve been known to make a bit of noise, myself, in my time,” said Mrs Potts, simpering at him.

By the time they got the rest of the bedstead up, she had the stove fueled and started and had produced an oil lamp to supplement the meager foggy light from the window; by the time they brought the table she had organized the man in the third floor front to put the bedstead together; by the time they started bringing up boxes of books, she and he had the furniture arranged in what was probably the only convenient way to arrange it; and by the time the Morris was empty and Aziraphale could hang his clothes on the rod in an awkward alcove near the window, she had brewed up tea for everybody and produced a deck of cards, so they all huddled as near to the stove as they could, getting feeling back into their extremities. Mrs Potts perched on one of the chairs with her eyes very bright and her cheeks very pink, asking impertinent questions and telling everyone’s fortunes in playing cards laid out on the table, with an air of benevolent simplicity. “Oh, you have a long hard road ahead of you,” she told Aziraphale, “but true love will find you and see you through.” Crowley, she said, would keep bad company, and need to keep his wits about him, for someone wished him ill, but true love awaited him also. Lesley already had true love, and needed to eat more roughage. The boxes of books seemed to confound her unduly, but she was forthcoming about the best ways to deter fleas, bedbugs, and blackbeetles.

 With not a bite to eat in the place and the cold breath from the newly-glazed window urging that a curtain be provided sooner rather than later, once the tea was consumed Angel and Crowley bore Lesley off to a nearby pub for a nice hot lunch before he undertook the long drive back to Lancashire, and then they went shopping. Crowley felt wonderfully domestic, making the acquaintance of the local grocer, tobacconist, purveyor of dry goods, and even the butcher, whose products seemed less fraught with horror than they often were, and helping to select a curtain with suitable proportions and insulating qualities. He pretended to himself that he would be drawing that curtain in the evenings and opening it in the mornings; that the butter would be scraped over his toast, the sugar and tea be the first thing he tasted after crawling out from under the weight of the old duvet that had used to cover the bed in the Little Room Next to the Nursery.

It was a pleasant pretense, and harmed no one.

They spent the rest of the afternoon arranging books and putting the room to rights, a process which involved Aziraphale sitting on the floor placing books in piles, occasionally pausing to flip through one and possibly read a passage out loud, while Crowley puttered around hanging the curtain, making the bed up to be possible - if not precisely comfortable - to sleep on until the mattress was delivered tomorrow, putting away the china, and occasionally polishing something, until Aziraphale directed him to a pile and told him which shelf to put it on while he shelved a different pile. They had dusted all the books when packing them, so Aziraphale did not dust them again; but Crowley did. He drew the process out as long as he could, asking questions about the principles of organization Angel was using this time (it seemed to be different from the ones he’d used at Oxford) just to hear him explain and watch his hands flutter, wave, point, and tap from one book or shelf to another. By the time the books were all snugly where they belonged they were both dusty and ready for more tea; fortunately, Crowley’d had the foresight to fill the kettle as full as it would go and set it on the stove before they began, so that they also had enough hot water to take the edge off the cold water from the sink when they washed themselves before, and the tea things after.

Then they sat side-by-side on the bed, with only a few blankets and the worn duvet between them and the slats; but Crowley was done with being upright and needed to slouch, proper slouching was impossible on those chairs, and he was slouching against Angel, the Cushion of the World, talking about contract law and electrification and plumbing, and how medieval peasants bathed, and eventually, somehow, whether or not ducks ever got lost. They considered opening the bottle Crowley had brought as a housewarming gift, but it seemed a deal of work to cross the room to fetch it. The stove drew reasonably well. The oil lamp (not Mrs Potts’s, but one they’d brought with the china from Oxford) on the table provided enough light to see each other. They were warm, and drowsy, and kissed intermittently. In time, they would dress - Crowley’s evening dress hung amid Aziraphale’s clothes in the odd corner - and go out, first to dinner and then to a show, and perhaps afterward he would come back up for a nightcap before he retrieved his car.

“I’m happy,” said Aziraphale, tapping his fingers sequentially against Crowley’s matching knuckles. “I’m in disgrace with my father, my purest romantic inclinations are illegal, my future is uncertain, and my neighbor considers my new home nigh-uninhabitable. But I am positively fizzing with happiness. Isn’t that strange?”

“No,” said Crowley. “You were born to be happy. What’s the poem say? Every night, and every morn, some to sweet delight are born. Some are born to sweet delight -“ He faltered, remembering the last line as he approached it, and Angel kissed him before he had to say that some are born to endless night.

--
Having Angel in town didn’t mean that many more meetings between them, as it turned out. In addition to managerial duties, he had made friends with the proprietor of the Eternally Closed Bookshop and was working (for a certain value of working) for him, at irregular hours and a nominal wage, and learning the used book trade, including how to read a book catalog, how to value a book, how to mend one, and how to discourage customers who were not worthy to own the books. Aziraphale’s inability to cope with numbers turned out to be a great boon on this front, as people who stormed off before he could make the amount come out correctly were definitely unworthy. That innumeracy also made valuation dodgy was a bit of a hurdle, but, as his mentor pointed out when he grew discouraged on the subject, valuation was subjective and varied from customer to customer anyway, and he had his entire life to work on the problem.

As for Crowley, the term was a demanding one. In addition to his lectures and reading, the Foundation had him cultivating the scions of great houses, both financial and county, in order to lead them down the primrose path of profitability. This involved a lot of dining out, a lot of theater, a lot of clubs, and a lot of parties which he gradually came to realize were fields of operation for doctors with access to substances that were easier to start using than to stop, card sharps, and similar expensive acquaintances. No doubt some of the parcels he couriered were drugs, or drug-money, as well as blackmail. He was also being trusted with packages for an older Prince Boy who was established in a respectable jewelry firm. He didn’t really know that anything he did was illegal.

“What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve after,” he told the younger Prince Boys - Ears, and Smith, and Carruthers - who sought him out sometimes, smoking and drinking whiskey in his lodgings on nights when they had all been out late and their nerves were jangled. “More importantly, from the Prince point of view, you can’t tell what you don’t know. You are innocent boys taking advantage of your opportunity to make friends in high places, and doing the occasional favor for your friends without thinking anything of it or being curious about it. At worst maybe you thought you were ferrying presents for ladies of easy virtue or something.” He pushed the posh accent as far as it would go. “A gentleman doesn’t split on his friends, you know, and we’re all trying so hard to be gentlemen, what?”

“We won’t really ever be taken up by the police, will we?” Ears asked. He always sounded a little apologetic, since the firecracker incident. “The Princes know what they’re doing?”

Crowley shrugged. “You probably won’t, and if you are, as long as they think you’re valuable you’ll probably be protected. If they have to sacrifice somebody, it’ll probably be somebody not formally sponsored by the Foundation, somebody on the fringes. We’re the cream, after all, the valuable assets with the most years and money invested in us - the folks who open the doors and make the facade respectable. But that doesn’t mean they won’t cut us loose if we don’t please them.”

“Like they did you.”

“Yup.” Crowley was nearly horizontal in his chair, looking at the ceiling, where smoke hovered like fog. 

“But they took you back,” said Smith, the newest of them, fresh out of Wellborn Hall.

“I survived,” said Crowley. “In terms of boys, they took a loss on the War. They were gambling that they’d make that up in other areas, and maybe they did, but the steady progression has been tangled and interrupted. I should have been a solicitor by now, getting on with the fraud and whatnot.” He paused, frowning up at the smoke. “I should stop drinking. I think I’m wandering. The point is - they tell you you’re secure, but you’re not. You never will be. Unless you make yourself secure, and I can’t tell you how to do that, because I haven’t figured it out yet and besides, you’re not me. Security may not mean the same thing to both of us.”

“Should we be talking like this?” Carruthers asked. He was working on his third whiskey, and should also stop drinking. “Ligur says we can’t trust each other. What if one of us tells Mr B what you just said?”

“Then you do. And if I get consequences, I know one of you did. And maybe I do something about it, or maybe I don’t. You can’t control that. You can manipulate other people, but you can’t control them. Got to roll with the punches. And here’s the thing. On the one hand, we can’t trust each other, because any one of us could rat us out to the Princes hoping to get one up on the others. But on the other hand, we can only trust each other, because nobody else knows what being a Prince Boy entails.” He held his cigarette vertically in front of his face, letting the smoke rise straight up. “You know Ligur’s got a daughter?”

They nodded; he could see them out of the corner of his eye, beyond the edge of the glasses, nodding in unison. “What about it?” Carruthers asked.

“She was in an untenable situation. Ligur couldn’t get her out of it. His sidekick couldn’t get her out of it. He didn’t want the Princes to know about her yet. He came to me. I got her out of it and put her in his arms. Well. Metaphorically. And he paid me. I don’t want to exaggerate things here. Being paid is always nice, because you’ve got to feather the nest against disaster. Next time, it might be me paying Ligur. Ligur’s very big on not trusting, but when he had a problem he really cared about, he needed another Prince Boy. And I came through. I might not have. But I did. You can’t make a blanket rule about anything. You can’t afford to coast or make assumptions. You know those circus blokes, on a high wire? That’s us. One step at a time, keep adjusting your balance.” He jabbed out the cigarette and examined his hand for tremor. He was all right, no need to start another one. “The only thing you have any chance of controlling is yourself.”

Ears was looking at him intently; or possibly looking inward at some whiskey-infused vision. “You trust Angel.”

“So? Ligur trusts Hastur. The Princes trust Miss Dagon. So far it’s worked out for all of us. Tomorrow, who knows? Like I said. Rules, no good. Maybe you have a non-Prince Boy you can trust, maybe you don’t, how would I know?”

“Yes. But. Could we?”

“Could you what?”

“Trust Angel.”

Crowley stared at him, feeling the sneer metamorphose into scowl. “Angel. Is mine. No more whiskey for you.”     

“It’s empty anyhow,” said Smith, who had emptied it.

So it was, and the evening broke up, but there were others. Crowley didn’t know why he felt responsible for them, but he did; and when he grumbled about them to Aziraphale, he got kissed, in private, or beamed at, in public, and told he was a dear. “I am not a dear,” he’d sneer, “I’m a black-hearted villain leading them deeper into iniquity,” and get the same again.

They hardly ever had nightmares anymore. If one of them had a bad spell, they would drop round on the other, and everything would be all right. London was more stable, with an Angel to anchor it, even when Crowley couldn’t see him.

Aziraphale did not go home for the long vac, because the long vac is not relevant to someone attending no lectures and he had work to do in town. Crowley spent part of it at the Foundation, drilling the Scots out of a candidate’s mouth. Ian was skinny and pale and had a chip on his shoulder a mile high. Crowley tossed the cane he’d been given into the air, and caught it again, and Ian turned green, pressing his narrow hands into fists behind his back. Crowley let the lisp and the Scots back into his own mouth. “All right, the bluidy Ssassenach think they’re better’n uss, and that the way they yammer proves it, but ye and I ken, it’ss all a bluidy pantomime. They’re richer, nae better.”

“You talk like a bluidy snake,” sneered Ian, with an adorable baby sneer that made Crowley want to pinch his little cheeks.

“Not anymore,” said Crowley, snapping back to the approved intonation and degree of sibilance. “They beat it out of me along with the Scots. Or thought they did. I’m still a Scot for all that. If I can fool them, you can too, and beat the toffs at their own game. And if you do it without being beaten, you’ll have beaten the Princes, too, and shown me up for a fool. The Princes think you’re an ignorant dog that won’t remember anything but pain, but I think if you were that sort of boy you’d not be here in the first place. What do you think?”

Crowley never had to use the cane, which was good, because he was pretty sure he couldn’t have, that his hands would have shaken too much. Ian watched him instead of Miss Dagon for table manners at dinner, so he put an extra polish on them. The day he realized that not just Ian, but all the candidates and half the Wellborn Hall boys in residence that summer were watching him, he smoked most of a pack of cigarettes trying to keep his hands steady. 

The decorations that Prince Boys, dead and alive, had earned in the War had been transformed into displays, framed under glass, hanging on the walls of the entrance hall, and the ones he’d sent to the Foundation, one at a time as he received them, somehow made the largest. “They think you’re a war hero,” said Old Mr Prince as the University and Sixth Form Boys smoked cigars with him after dinner. “They think you’re wonderful.”

“They think I’m your favorite and they can overtake me if they do what I do, only better,” said Crowley. “I wish ‘em luck with that.”

The last half of the vac he was instructed to accept an invitation he’d received to a house party held by the cousin of an earl, to take a stroll on the terrace on the third night after the doors had been locked, and to forget to relock the French door behind him. He confessed to the possibility that he had done this when he reported the loss of his own best cufflinks and tie tack in the inventory of the robbery the next day - small potatoes beside the losses of other guests, but indicating how thorough the opportunistic sneak thieves had been. His allowance for the next quarter was even more generous than it had been in the past. He reported as gambling losses the amount which he handed off to Angel with which to start a savings account to feather their own nest. If they were ever to have a nest, they must have the feathers to hand.

One fine-ish weekend in October, Joshua came up from Oxford to see The Garden of Allah at Drury Lane and other sights about town. He particularly wanted to go to Speaker’s Corner on the Sunday, hoping to hear radicals. He had grown up very earnest, wearing a Fedora and soft collar, attempting to grow a mustache, and talking about things like economic justice and the (undeniable) injustice and shortsightedness of the Treaty of Versailles. Crowley treated him and Angel to lunch at a new place in Mayfair and they took a stroll through Hyde Park. At Speaker’s Corner, Joshua was drawn into a crowd around an angry pacifist. Crowley and Angel, being in the middle of a discussion on the best way to deal with the coming of another Guy Fawkes Day, found a handy bench. Crowley was expounding on all the reasons why it would be perfectly reasonable, affordable, and possible to rent a holiday cottage for a single night in the middle of the week in the middle of autumn when he realized that he’d lost his audience, Aziraphale turning his head and tilting it with the fixed expression of someone trying to make out something he heard. “What?” Crowley asked.

“I’m sure I’m mistaken,” Angel answered, “but - over there. Do you hear it?”

Crowley closed his eyes to focus better. One of the orating voices in the vicinity certainly had a familiar cadence. “You mean the indeterminate northern accent?”

“Yes. Is he talking about - witches?”

They looked at each other, stood, and followed the sound toward one of the thinner parts of the crowd.

“- soarin’ above the lines, laughin’ at the guns and pourin’ bullets doon on the puir unprotected soldiers as had naebody to pass out charms. And noo we hae the peace, they’re lookin’ around for other innocents tae ill-wish! I’m tellin’ ye, only the Witchfinder Army can hold the line agin their wicked wiles!”

Shadwell stood on an overturned apple crate in a shabby uniform coat with the insignia torn off, looking very much as he had in the trenches save that he had no helmet or gun and was several days away from his last shave, about which Captain Fell had been strict due to the fit of the gas masks. His audience consisted of a handful of hecklers and a gangly boy, about Josh’s age, with wire-rimmed glasses and a resigned expression, who stood holding a handful of flyers which no one seemed inclined to take, nor he to offer. “Goodness,” said Aziraphale. “I thought he’d never retire.”

“Could he have been demobbed against his will?”

“That would be a shame, with so many people who are desperate to come home still waiting,” said Aziraphale. “I’m afraid losing the structure of Army life might not be good for him. Does he sound - more incoherent than usual, to you?”

“ - an’ givin’ the cats funny names, aye, ye think Grimalkin is a joke?”

“No, mate, I think you are!” None of the people around the heckler seemed to mind that the fruit he’d plucked hung so low. And, speaking of fruit, they’d come equipped.

The gangly fellow turned beet red, but Shadwell kept rolling without missing a beat. “The funny name calls a demon into the beastie that mun be suckled at the witch’s teat, but not a natural teat, no! The divil gies ‘em extra nipples tae do the suckling wi’!”

“You listened to him a lot more than I ever did. I doubt I’m fit to detect the nuances,” said Crowley, as the crowd went wild on the subject of nipples.

“And I ken ye dinnae believe me but I see out there one as knows for a fact, who has witnessed wi’ his very own e’en, the truth of what I’m tellin’ ye!”

“Oh no,” groaned Crowley.

“Cap’n Fell! Come up here and testify to these unbelievers!”

Aziraphale put on a bright social face to pass through the crowd, and Crowley trailed after him, making eye contact with as many hecklers as he could (the glasses made this easier, as he could make up to three people feel the eye contact at a time, if they couldn’t see his eyes) and calling up a threatening sneer. Let them try to humiliate Angel, just try it!

“Good afternoon, Sergeant Shadwell! It’s such a delightful surprise to see you. I thought you were occupying Germany.”

“And so I was, till wicked wiles had me released as unfit,” grumbled Shadwell, “and me as fit as the day I enlisted! Will ye no come up here and give ‘em the word of a gentleman officer?”

“Oh, I’m not an officer anymore, nor ever will be again, I hope!” Somebody among the hecklers made a sound which suddenly made Crowley aware that Angel’s voice, his hands, his mobile mouth, his adorably precise and fussy way of holding himself, all fit into a picture that people carried in their heads, a picture labeled “effeminate,” “pansy,” and other words conceived as an excuse for sending him away to hard labor. “I’m plain Mr. Fell now. And I wouldn’t presume to get up there and speak on the subject of your expertise.”

“Bollocks! I ain’t askin’ ye to explain how to know a witch! I’m askin’ ye to witness to the effectiveness of the Witchfinder Army and the reality of the threat! ‘Tis the Lord’s work ye’d be doin’!”

Angel could no more refuse a plea from desperation than he could refuse a cream cake or a first edition. The gangly boy stared at him with bewildered gratitude and apprehension as Aziraphale approached the apple crate and stood in front of it, with his hands behind his back as he used to recite at school, smiled apologetically at the audience, and said his piece:  “I cannot claim to have ever seen a witch with my own eyes, but the Sergeant was always very conscientious in his duties, and saved my life more than once. I learned early in the War that, if I listened when he told me there were witches on part of the line, and deployed my men accordingly, the casualty rates were much lower. It is impossible to say, the conditions in the trenches not being conducive to scientific study, that the charms he made for anyone who would take them did indeed save any lives, but I always found that permitting them to be worn improved morale, which, as I am sure some of you are aware, is no small thing.”

As he spoke, Crowley paced the edge of the crowd, scanning it with the dark glasses and the Prince sneer, daring them to do or say anything; but one skinny toff, one soft one, one mortified boy, and Shadwell were not enough to deter them from taking the dare. He intercepted a thrown tomato, but the obscene speculation as to what else Angel had done in the trenches to improve morale got past him, and then they were surging, bad fruit and bad names flying. Shadwell yelled incoherently, livid with rage, and hurled himself down from the crate to meet them in battle. 

Crowley’s legs and arms were long enough to interfere with quite a few at once, the gangly boy (still clutching the flyers) gamely provided a second line of defense, and Angel caught Shadwell on his way down, put him over his shoulder, and beat a retreat with him toward Marble Arch. As soon as they seemed to have sufficient lead, Crowley and the boy broke, too, and the hecklers were not worked up enough to follow them through Cumberland Gate, so they met in the shadow of the Arch, Angel putting Shadwell gently back on his feet, but keeping a hold on him, as he seemed inclined to charge back into the fray. “Nasty minded tossers! Serve ‘em right if witches take the lot!”

“Now, now,” said Angel, “there’s no shame in an orderly retreat when outnumbered. Oh, dear, what a dreadful mess they’ve made of us!” His own coat had suffered only slightly, apparently from an outdated pear, but Shadwell’d taken a tomato to the forehead, and Crowley and the boy were a good deal the worse for wear. Crowley’s hat would never be the same. “We must retire somewhere and get cleaned up, before this juice sets, but first I must go back for the Lamb -“

“I’m here, I’m here,” said Joshua, panting up, a little disheveled. “I saw you being chased past, and tripped somebody. What on earth happened?”

“Vile heathens rejectin’ the sound of truth and yellin’ about pansies like that’s anything to do wi’ anything,” explained Shadwell, not quite foaming at the mouth. “So what if he’s a pansy? All toffs are. If they all followed their own inclinations we’d have nae nobility at all. It don’t make a man a bad officer and it don’t spoil his witness.”

“They objected to Uncle Shadwell’s message,” said the boy. “Er, it was very nice of you gentlemen to help.”

“Not at all, dear boy. It’s lovely to see him. Joshua, dear, I’m sure I’ve told you about Sergeant Shadwell? Well, here he is in the flesh. Sergeant, this is my youngest brother, Joshua, or the Lamb as I probably say more often than I should now he’s grown.”

“Aye, and this is me sister’s grandson, Newt. Private Newton Pulsifer of the Witchfinder Army! This is me old officer, that I’ve often told ye about, Fell, and Sergeant Crowley, too.”

“Just Crowley,” said Crowley. “Once a sergeant always a sergeant, but I never was one, not really. We’re both well out of it.”
 
The handshakes went round amicably until Joshua’s hand met Shadwell’s, and the old man recoiled. “What’s this, what’s this?” He grabbed the hand and turned it palm up, jabbing a finger at the red mark in the center.

“It’s only a birthmark,” said Joshua. “Got ‘em on both hands and both feet. They don’t hurt.”

“No more they would!” Shadwell threw the hand away as if it burned him, and started grubbing in his pockets. “It’s an extra nipple! A witchmark! Cap’n Fell, ye daft poofter, ye never told me yer wee brother was a witch!” His hand emerged holding a pin.

Joshua stood blinking in astonishment, Pulsifer turned bright red and pulled him away from Shadwell, Crowley stepped in between them, and Angel plucked the pin out of Shadwell’s hands. “Nonsense! He is nothing of the sort! Those aren’t witchmarks, they’re the marks of the crucifixion. They’re called stigmata.”

“Papish nonsense, but ye always were too high church by half,” snarled Shadwell. “I know it’s a dreadful hard thing to hear but I know a witch when I see one.”

“I’m afraid you’re in error this time.”

“He’s not even a woman, Uncle Shadwell,” protested Pulsifer. “And he helped us get away from the, um, the pro-witch people chasing us.”

“Why don’t we go on back to my lodgings and get cleaned up and have a drink,” suggested Crowley; and since cleaning up was clearly necessary, and he was outnumbered, Shadwell acquiesced, walking between Crowley and Aziraphale while Pulsifer - told off to keep his eye on the suspect - kept pace with Joshua in the rear. Aziraphale, remembering his sergeant’s preferences, detoured by a shop to get a can of condensed milk, and when the rooms were attained he saw to laying out tea and some light wine while Crowley collected coats and removed the worst of the ravages made on them. Shadwell grudgingly took his eyes off of Joshua long enough to admire the rooms, and then they exchanged postwar stories over the wine and tea (into which Angel shoveled nine sugars and condensed milk for Shadwell without so much as an eye blink) while Joshua and Pulsifer listened a bit awkwardly.

Apparently, the new officer Shadwell had acquired after Aziraphale’s accident removed him had proved to be a poor fit: a Southerner, unwilling to listen to witch reports, forcing the men to throw away their charms, and paying no attention to how well work was done if it was accompanied by any sort of ranting. He had reported his sergeant to medical authorities as a lunatic, and the fury with which Shadwell had met what he regarded as an accusation had not helped his case. He’d been summarily removed, temporarily housed in an institution, and released when his sister’s family agreed to take charge of him. “But there’s nae room in yon wee flat,” said Shadwell, “and I’ve nae mind to be a burden on ‘em.”

“I can sleep perfectly well on the sofa,” Pulsifer objected. “There’s no need for you to stay out all night under bridges and shoplift your dinner!”

“Aye, ye’re a good lad, Newt,” said Shadwell, “and I appreciate how you go about with me recruitin’, but I kin take care o’ meself.” 

(“No he can’t,” Pulsifer mouthed at Joshua.)

“It’s yer mam and sisters you should be worriting aboot,” Shadwell continued, turning to Angel. “Wi’ sae many men comin’ oot of the Army it’s been fair hard for the baith of us to find work.”

Crowley considered how much cash he could afford to donate, and the odds on being called on to make it a regular donation. Aziraphale looked thoughtful. “Do you know,” he said, “ I may know just the thing. I have some properties that I’m trying to fix up, and the men working on the theater are always complaining about people poking about and stealing their equipment.” This was the first Crowley’d heard of it. “I need a reliable man who can keep an eye on things.” Crowley shook his head frantically, but Shadwell perked up and he knew his objections would mean nothing. Shadwell’s past in or around the village of Auldmon might be distant and nebulous, and he might not be part of Captain Fell’s command anymore, but to Angel, he was part of his web of obligation, and there was no getting around that.

So Shadwell got a job, more or less, and moved into the furnace room of the theater after a disastrous attempt to house him in one of the flats. Something about having a space all to himself gave him the royal jimjams and he couldn’t get through the first day without running out into the court and berating passersby. With a tidy and controlled set up in the furnace room, however, he was able to keep the heat on in the theater, as well as patrolling the court and the areas undergoing building work faithfully all night long, and when he couldn’t find loiterers to accuse as sneak thieves he started cleaning up the trash that drifted in over the course of the day. It took several late encounters with Mrs Potts and various men who came in search of her for them to work out an amicable arrangement, but by the time Shadwell conveyed to Aziraphale the information that his helpful downstairs neighbor was a painted Jezebel by profession, they had already gotten into the habit of her bringing him a cup of tea in the afternoon, and a bit of dinner at the start of his evening rounds, which were also the start of hers. 

His nephew came by to check on him periodically, and took odd jobs as he could with the builders, and then with the theater, who could always use someone to haul on ropes and carry props and whatnot. He seemed to be fatal to anything electrical and was never allowed near the lights after the second time he touched one switch and the entire system went dark, but he was a willing enough lad and everyone was touched at the way he doggedly looked after his great-uncle, who never displayed any particular gratitude, was rude to everybody, and kept the court and the furnace room in better shape than anyone had ever expected court and furnace room to be kept.

This was typical of the series of small arrangements that, by the end of Aziraphale’s first year as live-in manager, changed the face of his little empire to an astonishing degree, before any of the modernizations to the flats that he envisioned could even begin. It was not unlike the small ways in which Grimsby had organized their form to everyone’s benefit at Wellborn Hall, Crowley mused, listening to him explain how the abandoned wife charring for her building in lieu of rent and for the others for pay worked for everybody; or how the out-of-work housepainter he’d allowed to labor in lieu of back rent had made the building he lived in so much more cheerful that he’d attracted several new tenants in flats that hadn’t been rented for months. People occasionally let him down, but he never let that stop him from believing in the next tenant he had the opportunity to make a deal with, and as his judgement was honed by experience, and to a certain extent by advice, he got better at gauging what kind of incentive would best motivate a given person to perform their part of a bargain.

Also, he had Mrs Potts, who, though far from clever, ably carried word of the needs of the tenants to Aziraphale, and word of Aziraphale’s needs to the tenants, bridging the gaps between them. In return, Aziraphale pretended not to know what she did for a living and more than once distracted inconvenient men, on both sides of the law, who might otherwise have created problems for her. When the theater opened again in time to put on a Christmas panto, and Aziraphale treated all the tenant children, as well as Angie and Uriel, to the matinee, Mildred took a tour of the properties and declared she couldn’t believe he’d done so much for so little outlay, and adjusted his projected budget accordingly. 

And then Shadwell, eyeing her suspiciously, inquired how many nipples she had; but this was the sort of crisis that Aziraphale, and Crowley, and Mrs Potts, and young Pulsifer, were well able to resolve tactfully by that time.

--
Crowley passed the bar on a soft spring day, and was immediately accepted for training as a solicitor by the firm of Prince and Prince. He had expected them to want him to be a barrister - he rather prided himself on his ability to talk people round - but did not ask for, nor receive, an explanation of their reasoning. 

What he did receive was the keys to a fully furnished flat in Mayfair and a manservant drawn from the ranks of those not sent to Wellborn Hall. Cassius Erich was one of a set of identical triplets plucked from the darkest depths of Whitechapel, where their novelty and their adeptness as pickpockets had attracted the attention of one of the Foundation’s more cynical talent scouts. He was one of those people who seem smaller and more delicate than they actually are, and he and Crowley sized each other up in the black-and-white marble foyer of the flat, Erich in the pokerlike stance of the valuable servant and Crowley slouching with his hands in his trouser pockets. “So you’re who they have spying on me, then,” he said, to break the ice.

“If you know which side your bread’s buttered, you’ll let me,” returned Erich. “And try not to be too complicated in your habits. My brothers and I may be called upon to play musical valets at a moment’s notice, and we all have to know each other’s masters’ habits frontward and backward.”

“Oh, come now,” said Crowley, “I’m hardly your master. Just somebody who grew up in a different gutter and climbed out on slightly higher ground than you ever had a chance at - for there wasn’t much likelihood of the Old Man breaking up a matched set. And you hardly need to fool me to generate a proper alibi for anybody.”

“I will if my instructions are to fool you. I wouldn’t put it past them to tell me to do that.”

“Neither would I, but give me some credit here. If you or one of your brothers tell me I’m supposed to be fooled, I’ll act fooled. It’s not in my interest to get you into trouble with the Foundation, nor in yours to put me in bad with them unless I go completely round the bend on you. We’re in the same boat. We can’t very well live holding knives at each other’s backs.”

Erich eyed him warily. “People do.”

“Then they’re idiots. Give me the tour here, would you?”

The flat, though housed in a Georgian building, was very up-to-date, with the latest model wireless set, and a telephone, and a luxurious bath with a tub actually long enough for his legs, which was something to look forward to. The black and white color scheme was a bit chilly despite the central heating, and he didn’t envy the charlady who’d have to keep white and black carpets clean, but after years of dormitories, cold water student flats, and temporary accommodations in the history-stuffed piles of Auldmon Abbey and the Foundation, he rather liked the relative spareness and sleekness of the furniture. And the lamps, most of which were scantily clad young ladies holding up glass orbs that unscrewed to put the bulb in (for the building was 100% electrified), though not what he’d have chosen himself, were hilarious. The bed, with its crisp white pillowcases and black duvet, was so inviting he fell into it face first and said, into the pillow: “All right, that’ll be all. Gonna take a long nap now.”

“No, you won’t,” said Erich, opening the black-and-silver japanned armoire. “You’re having dinner at the Savoy and it’s my neck if you don’t look right.”

Crowley groaned and rolled over. “That’s hours away and my evening dress is not that complicated.”

“You haven’t even seen your evening dress yet,” said Erich. “Your old stuff’s been packed up and sent to the foundation for trainees to practice on. It’s all new in here. They told me you were a clothes horse, so sit up and pay attention.”

“I am not a clothes horse,” grumbled Crowley, staring into the depths of the armoire. Stacks of snowy white shirts on the side, five different sizes of hatbox on the shelf above, racks of jackets, trousers, and waistcoats ranging from the dense gray of a stormcloud to the void black of the spaces between stars. “Have you seen the crowd I’m expected to keep up with? And I can’t help it I’m hard to fit so I have to be fussy.”

“Our man in Savile Row is familiar enough with your peculiarities we can trust him not to let us down,” said Erich, “but in case he made a miscalculation and I have to adjust on the fly I want time to deal with it, because I’m not familiar and if Mr B spots a safety pin all three of us suffer. Besides, don’t you want a bath first? I’m supposed to draw them for you, with testing the temperature and all that rot.”

“Ooh, yeah, that does sound nice,” said Crowley. “All right, go ahead and draw me the bath. I’ll try not to fall asleep in it.”

He did doze off, but Erich woke him up with a dish of coffee, and there was plenty of time to get the new outfit on, silk drawers to jet cufflinks, before the cab came. He wished, standing in front of the mirror waiting for Erich to finish scrutinizing and tweaking him, that he was going to dinner with Aziraphale instead. Perhaps he’d be released early enough to run over to Soho and show himself off, and get peeled out of it all. (Erich would know if he got peeled out of it. It was Erich’s job to undress him as well as to dress him and the idea made him want to weep. So far he’d managed to dodge being instructed to seduce, to bugger, or to submit to buggering by, anybody but Angel, but even the impersonal intimacy of a valet’s services felt like betrayal. He had to have Erich on his side, or this life would be unbearable.) “You don’t have to hold yourself so stiff,” said Erich, handing him a top hat and a silver cigarette case. “All these clothes were cut with the knowledge that you can’t stand up straight for toffee. Earls don’t get tailored so carefully.”

“Earls aren’t in polite society on false pretenses,” said Crowley.

“Yes, they are,” said Erich. “If there’s one thing you learn, in service, it’s that polite society isn’t particularly. You’re brazen enough to try anything, and well-dressed enough to back it up, thanks to me and our man on Savile Row. Besides, it’s all Foundation people tonight.”

Crowley took a deep breath. “That helps less than you think it does.”

“It means passing as a gentleman isn’t the chief thing to worry about, though. Buck up! What’s the worst that can happen?”

“Nobody knows,” said Crowley. “And I don’t want to be the one that finds out.”

He was calm by the time he swaggered into the private dining room at the Savoy. Logically, this was intended as a momentous occasion, marking his induction into the actual business life of the Foundation, despite the technicality of his legal training course still to come. Practically speaking, it was just another evening with those in power over him, people to whom he must playact respect without seeming cowed, who must end the evening convinced that he accepted his leash with no wish to slip it; with no notion that slipping it was possible. It was a small party, just a handful of the Boys who had preceded him to this estate, including Ligur and a couple of fellow survivors of the War, and of course Mr B and Old Mr Prince. The dinner was excellent, his position at Old Mr. Prince’s left hand facing Mr B, on his right, nothing he couldn’t handle.  The conversation was probably, for the most part, not especially different from the conversation of a similar group of young men about town presided over by their elders, involving the movement of money, the progress of business affairs, buying and selling and clients and gossip.

“What do you know about this summer holiday at Lake Windermere my girl’s been invited on?” Ligur inquired of Crowley over the turbot. “Are you going?”

“I hope I’ll be able to make it there on a weekend or two,” said Crowley, “but I can hardly ask for a holiday before I’m well begun in the office. Joshua’s dropping out of Oxford and trying new things, took it into his head he needs to learn to sail. His old tutor’s retired to share a houseboat with a friend on Lake Windermere and they’ve undertaken to teach him. It’ll be Josh, and Angel, and the Grimsbys - Angie’s very excited about it - and I understand Mickey plans to spend a week or two there with her boys, come August, as well. Quite a big production, in its way. It’ll be the first time Angel’s been out of town since he moved to Soho, except for Mrs Device’s funeral, and the first proper holiday Angie’s ever had. Boating and swimming would be easy on Uriel’s leg. She’ll be out of the cast by then, won’t she? How’s she getting along?”

“Yes, the doctor says it’s healing nicely. I’ll ask his opinion and if he says it’s good, we’ll plan on it.” 

“Terrific. Unless the tutor has local friends with children, if you don’t let Uriel go it’ll just be Angie and a bunch of grown-ups till Mickey and the boys arrive.”

“Well, we can’t have that!” Ligur chuckled; a sound that he never made, except in regard to Uriel. 

“I’m delighted to hear that little Uriel’s doing so well,” said Old Mr. Prince. “Such a dreadful - accident. But I wouldn’t have thought that the Grimsby child was the kind of companion you preferred for your ward.”

“Oh, she’s got posh friends enough,” said Ligur carelessly, but he gripped his fork and knife too tight. “Her nanny’s as good a snob as you could ask for, and she has - well, she had - dancing lessons with a gaggle of little princesses. Goes to birthday parties and all sorts. But she and Angie have gotten attached, and there’s nothing rough or unladylike about her. They’ll grow apart naturally enough once they start at different schools without going through the agony of trying to separate them now.” And Angie never made careless remarks about Uriel’s complexion, or hair, or lack of mother, but that was not the kind of thing one said in front of the Princes. “I don’t think anybody could object to her getting to know the Hostmassif boys, when they come, though they’re a little young to be proper friends yet.”

“It’ll be good for them to learn to let Angie and Uriel boss ‘em around,” said Crowley. “And good for Uriel to learn how to mind them, I expect. Angie has younger cousins to exercise her authority on, but Uriel’s shy of opportunity. Wrapping her dad and Uncle Froggy around her little finger doesn’t count.”

“How is Froggy?” Mr B asked. “Not too upset by his day in court, I hope?”

“No, why should he be? He came out with his name intact, and made a good bet on a long shot that same afternoon.” Ligur would not have looked at all uneasy to anyone who hadn’t known him a long time. “Froggy’s unsinkable, and he had a good barrister, besides.”

“He should never have needed a barrister,” said Mr B. “He should never have been under suspicion at all.”

“I know. The police made fools of themselves over it.” Ligur leaned back to let the waiter clear the fish plate and replace it with lamb, as easily as if he didn’t hear anything ominous in the remark; but the eye contact he made with Mr B across the table went on a beat too long for casualness. “I’m sure he won’t have such a problem again.”

“I certainly hope not,” said Mr B. “Your friend has been useful to us many times, and I hope will be again, but the kinds of services he provides are not so hard to come by that we could not dispense with him if he became a liability, as he certainly would have been, had he been convicted. Perhaps he should take a little holiday, too, to recover his sang-froid.”

Crowley wondered briefly what Hastur had so nearly been caught doing, and decided he would prefer not to know. There was a reason he didn’t read the newspapers much.

Not until the crepes suzette were all consumed, the dishes cleared, coffee served, and the party begun to break up, including Ligur taking himself off,  did Old Mr Prince smile his particular confidential smile at Crowley. “And so,” he said, “you are one of us. A full member of the Foundation in good standing.”

“If you say so, sir,” said Crowley. “I hope I can meet expectations.”

“I hope so, too,” said Old Mr Prince, “and at this time, it is my custom to lay out a little more precisely what those expectations are.”

“I am all ears, sir,” said Crowley, wishing he hadn’t had quite so much coffee today. On the other hand, if he seemed jittery, coffee was a good excuse. He reached for his cigarette case, was forestalled, and accepted a cigar instead. I’ll walk to Soho, he thought, let the fumes blow away.

“The Prince Foundation,” said Old Mr Prince, “is a vast machine, unique in the world. I designed it. I manufactured it, piece by piece - never mind how I acquired the starting capital. I am proud of it. It works because each piece understands its own work, and understands also that it is only one piece of a larger whole, which can be replaced if it does not do that work satisfactorily. The Prince Boys are the most costly elements of the design, but even they are replaceable.”

“Of course we are. A new one comes along every year.”

“Precisely. While a Prince Boy is at Wellborn Hall, he is the beneficiary of the work of the Foundation machine, but he is also one of its products. He is shaped and honed, refined, if you will, from a raw bundle of potential that the world was on the verge of wasting into a useful, if somewhat generalized, component of that machine. When you entered University, you were put to work in small ways that also acted to shape and specialize you. We have always observed you closely, the better to understand what your optimal final shape might be, and to mold you into that shape. And now - here you are, bright and sharp and ready to slot into your allotted space.”

“So I am,” said Crowley. “Do I get to find out what shape I am now?”

Old Mr Prince laughed his dry, disturbing laugh. “You’re what we call a fixer. It’s been easy to file you down into one - it’s so nearly your natural shape. You’ve been doing it for years. Somebody brings you a problem, you provide a solution. Can’t keep up with the class, in dutch with authority, flew a little too high introducing Lord So-and-so to gambling, got engaged to two young ladies -“

“Ears wasn’t exactly engaged.”

“It was a sticky situation and you sorted it out neatly, without any hard feelings or damage to any reputation. You did it at Wellborn, you did it at University, you did it in the Army, and you will continue to do it as a solicitor for Prince and Prince. But this business of deciding for yourself which problems you will solve - that ends today.”

Crowley tilted his head and blew a smoke ring, slowly, watching Old Mr Prince’s eyes being drawn away from his not-quite-steady hand by the rising, twisting wreath. “What if I see a potential problem, and a chance to solve it pre-emptively? Can’t I take action and explain myself afterward?”

“If that happens, your explanation had better be rock-solid, and had better lay out convincingly the way in which the problem involved Prince interests and the solution improved them. Do you understand what the Prince interests are?”

“Making money, mostly. It’s a costly machine to run. When I think of the pounds you’ve splashed out on my new flat and wardrobe alone - thank you for all that, by the way, it’s all gorgeous   - let alone the educational costs, and multiply them by the number of us there are, well! I have to stop thinking about it before I get palpitations, that’s all.”

“That’s true enough and should never be neglected, but money is only the means to an end. Wealth, influence, power, privilege - all the things that the elites of Britain have declared their own by right, and spread across the world abrogating to themselves - that is what keeps the machine going, and rewards all those who are part of it. The British Empire is a similar, much larger-scale machine, sucking all those things out of the world and into a handful of families. We are the leeches drawing it out of those families, painlessly, so subtly they don’t even notice us fattening on them.”

“What, stealth socialism?” 

Old Mr Prince laughed, shaking his head. “Oh, no, no, not at all! Socialism will never work because its purpose is to evenhandedly distribute what it is against all human nature to share equally! People with a larger share of the good things of life will always exist. My machine just ensures that a percentage of these fortunate people will be us:  a self-selected group whose natural talents would suit us, in an unattainably fair system, to the attainment and enjoyment of privilege, but who have been consigned, by circumstances beyond our control, to the class of people to which the British system will forever deny all privileges.”

Crowley listened to this explanation with half-closed eyes, sorting the convoluted clauses as they came through his ears, in a way he could not have done without years of listening to legal texts read out loud. It was a good thing he hadn’t had to read that explanation - it would have defeated him. “I see,” he said. “So we’re an extra elite, defined by you.” 

“Exactly.”

“A good many of the people we go about with day-to-day wouldn’t like that.”

“No, they would not. The entire structure of the British legal system - of the legal systems of every country, even those that pride themselves on their equality, such as the United States and the new regime in Russia - is designed to empower the chosen ‘legitimate’ elite and criminalize the rest of us. You may have noticed that the Foundation is not particularly strict about its members adhering to the laws of the land. This is why.”

“I see,” said Crowley, who did; who had, in fact, figured that bit out some time ago. “If we can make a law work for us, good, and if we can’t, anything we can do to evade the consequences is fair game. That’s why the law firm is the flagship business, not the bank or the brokerage that produce the most income.”

“The quickness with which you grasp the point is one of the reasons you were chosen to be one of us. And why you were one of those chosen for the practice of law rather than medicine, business, or industry.” Old Mr Prince regarded him with satisfaction. Not pride, or approval. Satisfaction in having chosen an apt tool for his purpose. Any future success of Crowley’s would serve to confirm the old man in his good opinion of his own acumen, not to endear Crowley to him as a person. 

Not that he’d ever expected to be valued as himself here. In that respect, he was better off than Angel and the Lamb, endlessly waiting for any sign that their Pater accepted them as adequate, unable to bring themselves to believe that the nature of their relationship excluded the possibility of any such thing. Crowley made some suitably grateful and flattered noises, which Old Mr Prince accepted as his due. 

“I have no doubt that the next thing I have to say is redundant, to one of your ready apprehension,” he continued, “but I have always found it best to spell this point out, to remove even the possibility of the claim of confusion. In order for everyone who is part of the machine to benefit from the actions of the machine, every part must work as intended. It is a fundamental necessity for you, when given a task which is personally unpleasant, or seemingly irrelevant, or perhaps too messy for your taste, to perform that task. Because you are one of our best and brightest, you will be allowed a great deal of latitude in how a task is performed. You will be told to bring about a certain result, and so long as that result is achieved, without creating new problems such as, for example, legal action taken against some other member of the Foundation, you will be protected and your standard of living maintained. Perform it well enough, and your standard of living will be improved.”

“Hard to imagine how,” said Crowley, interpreting Old Mr Prince’s pause to sip his cigar as a pause to enable some suitable remark, tailored to further comfort his self-esteem.

“You will find that the imagination improves as you become more accustomed to the perks of the job.” The smile with which he said that made Crowley’s spine feel cold, and he was glad to have the cigar, though he didn’t enjoy the things at all. “Perform poorly, however, and there will be consequences. If you fail a task, or fumble it, thus creating new problems that disrupt the smooth operation of the machine, there will be fewer benefits to spread around, and I am of no mind to make anyone who did not err suffer for that failure. You will lose privileges, you will lose status, you will lose whatever, in my judgment, will best motivate you to once again succeed. If you refuse a task outright, or perform consistently poorly over time, we have the option to destroy you.” He leveled his gaze at Crowley’s eyes, and held them there.

Crowley was glad of his dark glasses; glad that Old Mr Prince had gotten sufficiently used to them as to not have thought to make him take them off. He licked dry lips with a dry tongue. “That’s fair,” he said, “since you made me.”

Old Mr Prince’s gaze did not shift. He did not blink. His voice was as mild and bland as it ever got, as he said: “More to the point, we have, and will exercise, the option to destroy Aziraphale Zebulon Fell.”

Crowley froze, except for the tremor of the hand holding the cigar. The other one pressed too hard against the arm of his chair to tremble. “What’s he got to do with anything?” He asked, as easily as he could. Not easily enough.

“Do you think I’m stupid, Mr Crowley?” Old Mr Prince smiled, or at any rate curved his lips and bared his front teeth. “When you first formed, and I first encouraged, your connection to the Fell family, I assumed that it would require a certain amount of cultivation if I wished it to stand the test of time, but it became clear enough, soon enough, that this would be unnecessary. If you really didn’t want me to know, you should at least have pretended to have other romantic liaisons. To have shown some sort of interest in the services of some of the persons of easy virtue to whom you have so ably introduced the scions of noble houses. Though it would have been too late, by then, seeing how obvious you made it, while you were still at Wellborn Hall, that you would do anything for your Angel. You needn’t look so pale. I’m not angry.”

Crowley swallowed, and swallowed again, his mind racing. “Why, why should you be, after all? If I’d do anything for him, there’s no limit to what you can expect me to do, if I know that my failure comes out of his hide.”

“It really is delightful, how quick on the uptake you are,” agreed Old Mr Prince. “Your friend Ligur, now - I say ‘friend,’ I know you don’t, in fact, like each other much, or at all - it took him some time to grasp that, far from being angry with him for forming a sentimental attachment to Michaela Fell and the offspring he so cleverly begat on her for purposes of future blackmail,” (Oh, you liar, thought Crowley. That’s not how it happened at all!) “I was grateful for being given such a pair of useful handles for his leash. Ligur and his friend Hastur have been effective parts of the Foundation’s machine, but they have grown - erratic. A little too prone to indulge their personal tastes for maximum efficiency. A little inclined, I’m afraid, to grumble and resent the perfectly reasonable restrictions that come along with the benefits of being part of the machine. A little damage to his lovely Princess Uriel, however, and they’re both back in line.” He took his eyes away from Crowley’s face at last, to watch instead his own gnarled hand stroking the smooth length of his cigar. “And of course, handles can do double duty, can’t they? Your Angel’d be ever so upset, if something dreadful - something more permanent than a broken leg - happened to his sister or his niece. He’d probably cry.” He shuddered delicately, and tapped ash into the tray at his elbow. “Ugh, I can’t stand a man who cries. But you like them that way, don’t you? All soft and womanish, without being women at all.” He shrugged. “No accounting for tastes, and I don’t have to understand such things in order to use them. If I have to.”

“You won’t have to,” Crowley heard himself say. “Not on my account. I don’t, in fact, need any warnings or threats to keep me in line. I know where my bread’s buttered, and I know what it is to have neither butter, nor bread. The Foundation’s a beautiful machine and I wouldn’t disrupt its operation for the world. But I thank you for your candor, sir, and I will bear what you say in mind.”

“See that you do,” said Old Mr Prince. “I think it’s time to call it a night, don’t you?” He grinned like a crocodile. “Plenty of time left to drop in on your Angel, and remind yourself of everything you could lose, if you weren’t such a faithful servant of the machine.”

Chapter Text

The Archangel looked upon the fat field, and upon the lean one, and asked Aziraphale: “Why did you bless this crop and not that one?” And Aziraphale replied: “I blessed them both; but a blessing can only do so much. The fat field was manured, but the dung heap was not big enough to also manure the lean one.” Then Gabriel was puzzled and asked: “What is manure?” And when Aziraphale explained, Gabriel was much dismayed and said: “And you say that people eat what is grown from this?! That is revolting! I will not partake of any feast made for us from the crop of the fat field, and wonder that anyone does.” Then Aziraphale replied: “That is all very well for you and I, who need no material nourishment; but for humanity, it is much otherwise.”

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

Crowley didn’t like feeling out of control of his situation.

Ever since he and Angel entered the shop on Tuesday night, he’d been running as fast as he could trying to stay in the same terrible place, and failing. Between Mr B’s instructions and the telephone call from Angel, telling him that they were going to Lancashire tomorrow (nobody drove Angel anywhere except him, certainly not with a murderer on the loose), he was scrambling, and very glad he’d driven from Mayfair to the Temple, because at least when he drove, he was in control of something. Rather than going straight home or to the bookshop, then, he drove around a bit. Hard luck on his police shadow, who was no doubt loving hanging about in the cold watching the firm’s door all day, and then trying to keep up with him when even he didn’t know where he was going, but without Angel in the car he didn’t have to consider anybody but himself unless he felt like it, and he didn’t feel like it. He needed the combination of mindless routine and keen awareness of his surroundings that driving provided to generate the state of mind he needed, so he could sort out events and see his way clear.

It’s all about the nets of obligation, he thought, all of us trapped in the damn things, mine and Angel’s overlapping, and somebody out there, tearing his to shreds. Like I want to tear mine, but not, because dammit the point is to escape without casualties and Joshua - his brain abandoned language, shying away from shock and pain to spread out in a complex pattern he’d been constructing and examining daily for years now, connections and old deeds and new deeds and conflicting desires and dangers and responsibilities. He dodged in and out of every life he touched, trying to line people and events and knowledge up like dominos, and now Joshua’s domino had been ruthlessly crushed, which was not supposed to happen, apparently by some random element outside of the Prince network, which was also not supposed to happen. He was supposed to know all the directions danger could come from, and people kept throwing new dominos down and he couldn’t allow any more of them to be crushed, nor to fall the wrong way, that would be disastrous, that would be -

He saw a domino slogging head-down through the crowds toward Piccadilly, and suddenly everything was clear. He had an action he could take - right now - if he pushed this one and a couple of others now most of the dominos would fall right, and if he missed his moment - he mustn’t miss his moment.

Crowley cut off a taxi, pulled up to the kerb beside Hastur, and blared his horn, rolling down the window.  “Oi! Froggy! Get in!”

Hastur turned with a snarl. “I’m not getting in a car with you, you murdering git!”

“There’s a cop on my tail. Can’t do anything to you with a cop on my tail, can I? You’re safe as houses and I need to tell you something. Urgent. Where nobody can hear us. Where are you headed? I’ll give you a lift.” Hastur shuffled his feet, glancing around, no doubt looking for the tail.  “Come on, it’s too ruddy cold for this!”

“It’s cold in your ruddy car, too.” But Hastur got in, rubbing his hands together. “I was going to take the tube to Elephant and Castle - meeting a bloke. Maybe catch a film after. Make me late and I’ll cut you.”

“Nobody’s ever late with me driving,” said Crowley, shooting away from the kerb so fast Hastur yelped, pressed back in his seat by inertial forces. “If you want to survive a trip don’t go sticking knives in your driver.”

“As long as the driver keeps his knife out of me. What’re the police tailing you for? And where are they? I can’t see ‘em.”

“A couple of cars back,” lied Crowley, who had no idea, making an illegal turn to head for the Strand. “They say it’s a protective detail, but I don’t know, do I? And they won’t say who I need protecting from, or why. Probably it’s to do with Josh. Mr B seems to think so.”

“Huh.” An oddly satisfied grin spread over Hastur’s acne- and rugby-scarred face. “I told ‘em you killed him. They said they didn’t believe me. But maybe they did.”

Crowley sighed. “You idiot! Why the hell should I kill Angel’s baby brother?”

“Probably ‘cause he told you to.”

“I should kick you out at full speed for that!” The car took a corner too fast, almost but not quite losing traction on the wet street.

Hastur yelled as he fell against the door. “What’d’ye want? You know I hate you and I know you hate me so what’d’ye think we have to say to each other?”

“I’m trying to do you a bloody favor so stop making it harder for me!” Crowley eased up getting onto Waterloo Bridge. It was likely to ice on an evening like this, and he’d no mind to go spinning out of control. That was the opposite of the point here.

“Why would you do me a favor?”

“Because Uriel’s Angel’s niece and I like being able to look him in the eye! Look, I know you think I killed Ligur, and I know why you think that, and I’m not going to argue about that right now, but you need to shut up and listen, all right? Mr B told me to burn you.”

“What?”

Crowley made a throwaway gesture over his shoulder, at the tail that, presumably, was still back there somewhere. “As I’ve been trying to say, there’s too many coppers all up in Fell family business, which is too close to the Foundation. Too much overlap, too many clews leading any which way, too many secrets not buried deep enough. They want the investigation over. Mr B told me to slap up some evidence against you and feed you to them.”

“Why me?”

“Something about you flapping your gums. I didn’t ask for details. And I don’t want to do it. I want the cops to find out the real culprit and hang ‘em higher than Big Ben. But I can’t risk Angel by telling Mr B to sod off and that’s all there is to it.”

“So what are you telling me about it for?”

“Give you a chance and me an excuse, that’s why. If I can keep you out of their hands for a few more days, poke around on my own - I’ll find who did it if the police can’t, dammit!” Crowley took one hand off the wheel - straight shot down Waterloo Road, now - and reached into the inner breast pocket of his suit jacket, extracting a rectangle of pasteboard. “Which won’t let you off the hook with the Foundation.  You know way too much for them to let you off the leash, so now they’ve decided to be rid of you, they’ll be rid you one way or another. You’ll want to get right away. Call that number and make arrangements, get on the boat train tonight, you’ll be well out of range before anybody can come after you.”

Hastur looked at the card, puzzled, and turned it over to look at the blank back. “Whose number is this? It looks foreign.”

“French. It’ll be a trunk call, sorry. You remember Jeannette?”

“Yeah, she didn’t like me.”

“How unusual of her. She likes money fine, so don’t be stingy, but the main thing is to tell her ‘the dominos are falling’ so she knows I sent you.”

Hastur frowned at the number again. “How do I know it’s not a trap?”

“You don’t.” Crowley turned abruptly down a side street and stopped. He leaned on the wheel and turned to look at Hastur, giving him the full brunt of the dark glasses. “Listen. I didn’t kill Ligur. I’ve done a lot of things for the Foundation, and so have you, but I didn’t do that. We don’t have to like each other. We’re in the same boat. It’s one thing to make some client’s nuisance disappear. It’s another thing to hang another Wellborn Hall charity boy. Besides, don’t I know, if you went down, you’d take me with you and make a sodding mess of the Foundation on the way? They expect you to not realize you’re being left in the cold until it’s too late, keep your trap shut waiting for protection. Probably give you a barrister primed to keep you quiet while he gets you convicted. But I know you better than that. Get out while the getting’s good and be glad Mr B didn’t give the job to anybody else.”

“There’s nobody else to give it to,” said Hastur. “You’re the fixer and I’m the accident man. Since the one that broke Uriel’s leg mysteriously vanished they haven’t added anybody. When they want to tweak my nose they tie up assets or give me the wrong tip at the races.”

“You don’t know as much as you think you do if you believe that’s all there is to it. The Foundation can still wreck you six ways from Sunday. But if you’re in France they know you’re not blabbing to Scotland Yard and they won’t need to wreck anybody. Now get out of my car.”

Hastur looked around. “This isn’t Elephant and Castle.”

“It’s two blocks away. I don’t want who ever you’re meeting to see you with me. If you think about it, you won’t either.”

“You don’t know who I’m meeting.”

“Witnesses are always bad news. They make things messy.  I hate mess.”

Hastur stalked off into the beginnings of a fine sleet. Crowley watched him out of sight before heading back toward Mayfair, moderating his driving to conditions but still passing everyone else on the road. It occurred to him that taking Westminster Bridge might be faster, but he was probably never driving that bridge again. He stopped once at Waterloo Station, and once at Piccadilly Circus, to use telephone boxes. Instead of garaging the car, he parked it in front of Georgian Terrace and betook himself up to the flat, where he found Erich reading the evening paper. 

“You’re late,” said Erich. 

“Yup,” said Crowley. “Put together an overnight bag. Angel and I are off to the Abbey tomorrow and I’ve started the dominos falling so I need to post the package as soon as possible and I don’t want him out of my sight anyway.”

“You what?” Erich leaped to his feet like a startled rabbit. “You can’t - it’s too soon!”

“It’s now or never,” said Crowley, “and it won’t be never. Trust me. Or don’t. After I’m gone you can clean out the cash and anything pawnable you like, grab your brothers, and take off, if you want to. It won’t hurt my feelings. Maybe enough dominos will fall without you lot.”

“Don’t be stupid,” said Erich, heading toward the bedroom. “Just overnight?”

“Assume two nights, one in Soho, one in Lancashire. The Lamb’s funeral’s Saturday. We can’t stay up north longer than overnight.”  

“I’ll pack your funeral suit in case of delays. What the devil’s happening?”

Crowley explained the situation through the open door as Erich packed for him and he strode around the apartment, scooping up things he wanted to keep by him, in case. It is not possible to predict all contingencies, or to control people. Once the dominos started toppling, anything might happen.

He’d resigned himself long ago to the fact that the only thing he could control was the moment and direction in which the first ones fell.

--
Even dressed for a long car trip, Mickey and Uriel looked posh and out of place in the bakeshop, which was barely open and mostly serving tea, buns, and bagels to men and women working early shifts. Newton Pulsifer took one look at them and tried to retreat from the table, but Crowley growled at him and he lingered. Aziraphale introduced him and everyone’s manners did the best they could. “You’re the one who almost saw the murderers,” said Mickey.

“Probably, yes,” said Newt. “If I’d gone to look a minute sooner -“

“You have nothing to reproach yourself with, dear boy,” said Aziraphale. “We may all be saying ‘if only’ about our own behavior before the end of this, and the only ones to blame will still be who ever - who ever committed the crime.” He inhaled sharply, and his voice sounded a little thin and high as he added: “I still can’t, can’t say what happened. Isn’t that stupid?”

“No,” said Crowley. “Drink your tea.” He turned to Uriel. “Wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

Uriel evaded the dark glasses by helping herself to a Chelsea bun from the tray on the table and pouring tea for herself and Mickey. “I wasn’t either, but I got the strangest call from Uncle Froggy last night, after I thought we had him settled down. He told me things were going to be messy for awhile and I should stick close to, to Mrs Hostmassif and get out of town.”

“Ha!” Crowley looked pleased, to those who could read the complex vocabulary of his face. “That’s probably good advice. Despite who it came from.”

“Is anybody here to look after Magdala?” Mickey asked, regarding the dark brew in her cup with scepticism. 

“Um, she’ll be at the theater part of the day,” said Newt. “Nobody expects her to work, of course, but she says she’ll be better with life going on. If she’s not up to the theater all day there’s the policeman who’s watching out for her and, well, any of us, really. Mrs Potts, and Uncle Shadwell, and me, and Mrs Grimsby - we’ll all be about.”

Mickey ran an eye down Newt’s figure as if dubious of his usefulness in deterring a murderer, but ate a scone instead of saying anything. The proprietor came over bearing a box and a thermos flask. “Here you are now, Mr Fell,” he said. “We can’t have you getting peckish on such a long journey, and heaven knows what sort of mucky tea they’d serve you in the wilds of the country. And there’s a nice big napkin on top, so as not to get crumbs all over inside that nice car.” He looked at Mickey and Uriel. “And you’d be the sister, then? Shall I be putting anything together for the road for you, ma’am? It’s a powerful long way to Lancashire, they tell me, and mourning is such hungry work, though like as not you don’t notice it till someone puts a bit in your mouth and you realize you haven’t had a bite or a sup for hours.”

Mickey blinked at him. “Nothing for me, thank you.”

“Well, if you’re sure. He was such a nice young man, your brother, when ever he came around we were all so happy to see him, and we’re all terribly cut up about him. And we’ll keep an eye on that poor bride of his. Coming all the way from foreign parts to be safe, and then this - if it were a play it’d make you cry your eyes out, and in real life you can’t hardly believe it really happened! You have a safe journey, now, and we’ll see you at the funeral if not before. We’ll all be going and I’ve sent my best suit to the cleaners, out of respect.”

“Thank you so much, Mr Storak,” said Aziraphale. “I know it would mean a lot to him.”

He walked away, Newt excused himself, Uriel drank tea with a carefully blank face, and Mickey shook her head. “How the hell do you do this, Sunshine?”

Aziraphale finished the bite of scone in his mouth. “Do what?” 

“Pater was born in the Dower House and has lived at Auldmon Abbey his entire life apart from the stretch in the Army, and he isn’t half the lord of the manor there that you are here.”

“Oh, nonsense,” said Azirahphale. “I’m friendly with my neighbors.”

“You live in London! Nobody’s friendly with their neighbors here. And besides, they’re not neighbors! They’re tenants!”

“Well, yes, they’re those too.”

“His secret technique involves ‘being nice to people, and remembering their names,’” said Crowley. “You should try it some time. I gave it up as too much work a long time ago, but I can ride his coattails and you can’t.”

“Oh, hush, dear boy. There’s no need to be rude.” Aziraphale sipped his tea and contemplated the last Chelsea bun. “I am so glad I won’t be trapped in the car with you two sniping at each other again! Although - goodness, it’s practically a reunion, isn’t it? We only lack Jeannette.”

Uriel looked blank. “What are you talking about?”

“Our daring escape from France, my dear.” Aziraphale began unwinding the bun. “You were far too little to remember it, but Mickey and Crowley were about ready to strangle each other by the time we got across the Pyrenees. Neither of them trusted the other’s driving but there was no question of me taking the wheel on any of those roads.”

Uriel continued to look blank. 

“Has she never told you that story?” Crowley piled coins on the edge of the table. “She needs to tell you that story. It’ll help pass the time on the drive.”

Fortified with tea and pastry, the two cars headed out of London together, but they had not gotten a mile into Hertfordshire before the dark Bentley started pulling away from the pale Lagonda. Traffic was light this early - the only reason Mickey had agreed to leave at an hour when she would normally have been turning over for another forty winks - and Crowley could not keep his foot off the accelerator. The Lagonda followed as well as it could, but insisted on slowing down for things like corners, and lost ground steadily. It passed them when the Bentley stopped at the Luton post office, slowing questioningly, but Aziraphale waved them cheerfully past, and soon it came roaring up in their rear mirrors and sailed past them with a cheerful, not to say mocking, blast upon the horn.

Mickey and Uriel were much too engrossed in discussing things that they had never discussed before, to take the bait and involve themselves in a road race. Auldmon Abbey would be there, regardless of who arrived first.

--
“I did turn in that paperwork...No, he’ll need to run about all over, he needs a car...I explained all that in the paperwork...Thanks. You do that.” Inspector Lamb set the telephone receiver back in the cradle with slightly more force than usual and swivelled his chair toward Abbot. “You’ll have the car by ten. And when you come back you’d better have something worth the trip and the trouble, or” - the telephone rang - “please, God, let this be someone rushing to confess!” He picked it up. “Inspector Lamb speaking.”

“Ruth and the children have disappeared.” The voice on the telephone had a slight American intonation, which enabled him to recognize it as Gabriel Fell’s. 

Lamb sat up, and signaled to Abbot to pick up his extension. “Ruth Fell?”

“Yes, of course Ruth Fell!” Gabriel sounded angrier than he did distraught, but that was par for the man’s course. Inspector Lamb had encountered any number of the ways in which grief and anxiety manifest, and this was not the first time he had known them to be indistinguishable from irritation. “They got on the train in London and never got off!”

Abbot had his notebook out, scratching down a couple of pothooks. “All right, sir, I understand your concern, but let’s take this in order. Which train did they get on? Did you see them do it?”

“Yes, I saw them do it! It was the 2:17 to Manchester. They would have changed there for Milltown, where Uncle Matt was to have picked them up at 9:30 or thereabouts. He called me about ten last night, said the train had come and gone with no sign of them! Or their luggage! I’ve been up all night and called everybody in her address book. Nobody knows where she is!”

“And this is your wife Ruth and your two children, is it?”

“Yes, dammit, you know all this! Raphaela and Gabriel V!”

“Just making sure, sir. Now, here’s what we’re going to do. Sergeant Abbot is already scheduled to go up to poke around Lancashire today, looking for your brother’s killer -“

“What? Why are you looking there? He was killed in London!”

“His body was disposed of in London. We have reason to believe that the key to the mystery of his death is to be found elsewhere, and it may very well be that the same key can lead us straight to your missing family.”

“No, that can’t -“

“Also, we have a division dedicated to missing persons cases, who have plenty of experience in finding stray wives and children, so I’ll transfer you to them, and you can give them all the particulars, descriptions, what they were wearing, everything like that, and chances are good that they, with their procedures, can turn them up before the end of the morning.” This gave a generous impression of Missing Persons’s success rate, but nothing could be done without the confidence of the public.

“All right. All right. Do that. I can’t - Fiver’s the heir, dammit.”

It seemed an odd thing to worry about at this juncture, to Inspector Lamb, who if any of his girls had been missing would not have been thinking about plans for their future lives, but he wasn’t lord of an estate, and frightened people often spoke at random. “Just one moment, sir. We have received information, claiming that your father sold a valuable item -“

“Oh, for Pete’s sake! You’re not going to ask me about the goddamn book now? It’s got nothing to do with anything!”

“We don’t know that, sir. If your brother attempted to approach the purchaser -“

“He didn’t know who bought it! I don’t know who bought it! I wish the damn thing had burned in the Dissolution of the Monasteries! And you can’t believe a word out of Mary Hodges’s mouth!”

“All right, sir.” Lamb held the receiver away from his ear, grimacing at Abbot, who grimaced back in sympathy. “I’ll transfer you back to the switchboard now. She’ll send you to Missing Persons and we’ll start looking for your family immediately.”

Abbot waited until the operation was complete to set down the extension and say: “Good Lord! It can’t be a coincidence, but what could the murderer want with the children?”

“What does the murderer want at all?” Lamb scowled. “Everything’s happening at once, or at least we’re all finding it out at once, and I don’t mind telling you, I’m afraid by the time we sort out the wheat from the chaff we’ll be too late for somebody, and I only hope to God it’s not for Raphaela and Gabriel V!”

Frank nodded. The reports from Hastur and Crowley’s tails, the statement Miss Hodges had made late yesterday afternoon, the delay in availability of the car he needed to go to Lancashire, and now this - it felt as though the shape of the case and their response to it morphed by the moment. “I wish Crowley’s tail hadn’t been discontinued.” Something was going on out in the corridor, but something generally was.

“It seemed the sensible thing to do at the time, with Hastur covered, you going to Lancashire anyway, and the budget the way it is. The way he drives, even in London, there’s not much hope a tail could stick on him, anyhow. He certainly gave them enough trouble last night.” Lamb frowned. “I’m pulling Hastur in. I want to know what he and Crowley talked about in that car.” He put his hand on the receiver, and the telephone rang. He sighed, and picked up. “Inspector Lamb speaking -“

The thing going on in the corridor was Frederick Hastur, and now it was in the room with them, flushed and disheveled and shouting: “I’m turning State’s Evidence!”

“I know,” Lamb told the telephone, “he just got here; good job minding the door everyone, it will be remembered,” and hung up. “Are you now? Who are you testifying against?”

“The Princes! Try to burn me, the bastards!” Froggy paced the room, waving a lit cigarette in one hand and an overnight case in the other, his open overcoat flapping around him. “And Crowley! Thought he was mighty slick, trying to get me to leave the country so I’d look guilty! But I can give you names, I can testify them to the gallows, but I need that protective custody business and immunity, before they send somebody after Uriel. She’s all right for now, Crowley won’t touch her without Angel’s say-so and Mickey’s no pushover. She can go abroad all right. Ligur wanted her to grow up clean and I did it, she doesn’t know a damn thing. Not even about the ponies!”

“Mr Hastur, sit down!” Lamb did not exactly roar; but his voice had something in it that fairly toppled Hastur into a hard wooden chair. “If you have a specific statement to make I am willing to hear it, but I should tell you that anything you say may be taken down in evidence, that I am not authorized to make any arrangements for clemency or immunity in return for information, and that if this is to be another exercise in time wasting I will find something to charge you with. Do you understand?”

“Of course I understand, I’m not an idiot,” snarled Hastur, in the teeth of the evidence. 

“Very well then, let us proceed in an orderly manner. First and most importantly, do you have any information concerning the whereabouts of Ruth, Raphaela, and the fifth Gabriel Fell?”

Hastur looked taken aback. “What, there’s five of those prats? Oh, oh, the kid, that’s why they call him Fiver. I get you. Ain’t they at that townhouse, the one I’m not good enough to darken the door of? Went to school with Fell Major, played rugger with Sandy, but invite me over the threshold they will not, the sodding snobs. Somebody took the kids? Damn, that’s - wait, three of ‘em? I thought there was only two.”

“Mrs Gabriel Fell and her two children all went missing together,” said Lamb, with admirable patience. “Do you have any information on that score?”

It would be exaggerating to say that Hastur looked thoughtful, but he did frown and contort his face into an expression that seemed to indicate some sort of internal process. “Not directly, but I can tell you who might.”

“If you’re about to say Crowley, we have had him under observation -“

“Nah, nah, he might know something about it, but he’s too close - they wouldn’t use him. That’s the beauty of the system, Ligur used to say. The worst things, the robberies and the accidents and that, they’re never done by a personal connection. You’ll never catch the valet that told us about the jewelry in the same room as the safe, and he won’t have ever met the fence, count on that. I can’t even have the picture I use to recognize people on me when I do my jobs - got to spot him first, get rid of the picture, follow him around till the opportunity happens. Naw, if you’re going to snatch a Fell, you wouldn’t use Crowley, or me. You’d use somebody like Roger.”

Abbot was scribbling furiously. Lamb spoke more slowly than usual, to give him a chance to catch up as well as to make Hastur aware of how patient he was being. “And who is Roger?”

“Own brother to Dr David Saklas, of Harley Street, who was the Prince Boy two years behind Ligur and me at Wellborn. They’ve both come up in the world. Roger’s an estate agent. Knows every vacant property in town, about. Very useful information, that can be. Maybe he didn’t snatch ‘em, but I bet he’d know where they’re being held. If the Princes had anything to do with it, anyhow, and they probably do. He might even come clean about it - if he knew the Princes were burning assets, which they are. Ligur told me about that, too. They invest a lot in the boys, so they protect ‘em, and it’s in their interest to keep silent; but the less money they’ve spent on you the less valuable you are to them. He told me my best bet if I make ‘em mad is to crawl into the law’s pocket and sing like a canary, and so I will do, and so will Jolly Roger if he knows what’s good for him.”

“And where can we find this Mr Roger Saklas?”

Hastur did not have a precise address, but he knew the name of the firm and that the office was in Islington, so Abbot called in the tip to Missing Persons, while Lamb studied Hastur’s face and considered what to do with him. “You got into a car with Crowley last night and rode around with him for some time, at a dangerous rate of speed.”

“I know! That’s why I’m here, innit?”

“Tell me about that meeting.”

The account Hastur gave was, by Hastur standards, tolerably coherent, and he turned over the card with the number on it readily enough. On the back he had written, in a schoolboy hand, The dominos are falling and the name Jeannette. “That was Uriel’s nursemaid. Crowley brought her over from France when he fetched her.” His face grew thunderous with old grievance. “Ligur sent me first. Would’ve been simple if they’d let me have her, but Jeannette didn’t like the way I held her and wouldn’t cross the Channel with me, and Mickey wouldn’t make her.”

“Mickey. You don’t mean Mrs Hostmassif?”

“Sure I do! It’s a great and terrible secret ‘cause Cap’n Dick’d divorce her if he knew she had a baby with a black man before she ever had one with him. People’d stop coming to her parties, and ooh, we can’t have that now, can we?” He laughed his nasty, wet-sounding laugh. “Lot of secrets coming out now and Mickey’ll wish she’d been nicer to me, but Uriel will finally get her due, I reckon. Raising her’d have been a lot harder without Mickey, I won’t say it wouldn’t, and I didn’t even have to twist the knife, but s’not good for a little girl, is it, only ever having a mum in private and having to call her ma’am in the light of day?”

Abbot was off the telephone by now, and Lamb saw him hesitate to start his frantic notetaking again as he absorbed this information. “Not our business,” Lamb declared, while privately reserving the right to wonder what sort of grudges and potential plots might grow and fester in a clever, bereaved young girl’s mind, over years of being treated as a guilty secret. No, Uriel Ligur was still a wild card in the Fell murder and, now, the disappearance of the Fell heir. Not someone to lose track of. “Back to the point. Why on earth would Crowley send you to a nursery maid?”

“Because she ain’t a nursery maid anymore? I dunno, do I? I wouldn’t call that number for a million pounds. Probably something to do with how he gets rid of people - if he talks ‘em into going to France and dumps the bodies in the Channel along the way, that’d explain why nothing ever turns up. Jeannette’s a missing person herself, as far as I’m concerned. I paid her off and sent her packing once Uriel didn’t need her anymore. As far as I know she went back to France. She was a shrew to me, but she liked Crowley. And Angel. Women’ll turn their noses up at a decent man and go all soft for those two ponces. Women make no sense.”

Inspector Lamb was, as a general rule, as likely to be bewildered by women as the next man, but in this case, assuming that Hastur classed himself as “a decent man,” he was not inclined to agree. “Be that as it may,” he said. “Let me be sure I’ve got all this straight. Crowley informed you that the firm of Prince and Prince ordered him to frame you for the murder of Joshua Fell because the investigation brings the police too close to their interests, that he expressed himself unwilling to do this out of fellow feeling for your shared past and because he wants the murderer of Joshua Fell to be apprehended, that he gave you contact information for someone he says will get you out of danger from the Princes, and that you, convinced that Crowley is a murderer and specifically the murderer of Joshua Fell, decided that he was laying a trap for you and that you would, instead, come here and strike a deal with the police for protection in return for information on the, apparently extensive, criminal organization which you claim is run under cover of the Prince Foundation. Is that the size of it?”

“Yup,” said Hastur, lighting his third cigarette from the end of the second. “And I want you to notice, I gave you Roger free and clear.”

“Assuming that tip proves to be of any value in finding the missing Fells, that will certainly be borne in mind. Can you give me any specific information concerning open cases that would enable me to connect you to someone able to make the bargain you wish to make and supply the protection you wish to claim?”

“Sure thing. Got your pencil ready?” Hastur started reeling off names, dates, and crimes, fast enough that Abbot frowned over his notebook like a schoolboy over long division as he attempted to keep up. The crimes ranged from murder (all attributed to Crowley; he was not quite stupid enough to ask for immunity for a crime he was confessing to) to the fixing of football matches and made Lamb feel slightly giddy. When he finally caught a name he associated with an open case with which he was familiar, he held up a hand to stop him. “That’ll do,” he said, “it’s enough, anyway, to go on with.” He picked up the telephone, and this time got the call through. “Parker? You interested in the name of the fence who handled the sale of the Canterbury Diamonds?”

“Why, do you have it?” Parker asked.

“I’ve got a fellow who claims he does, and claims to know a lot of other things, as well, but he’s a person of interest in some rather nasty accidents and wants to make a bargain.”

“I’m not letting a murderer off to get the name of a fence.”

“He’s apparently got some juicy stuff about murders he hasn’t done, also, or at any rate missing persons. Claims to have the goods on a pretty far-ranging criminal organization, in fact.”

Parker paused for rather a long time. “But you think he’s credible? Not a fantasist?”

“I think he’d repay further conversation, but I’ve got an ongoing investigation that’s at a critical juncture and don’t have time to have those conversations, myself.”

“All right. Send him down, and I’ll get somebody from the Prosecutor’s office in.”

There were, of course, procedures - the last thing anybody wanted was Hastur randomly roaming the corridors of Scotland Yard, and he’d already caused a fair amount of upset and a broken doorknob gaining access to Lamb’s office - and while Lamb was seeing to them, Frank Abbot reviewed his notes on the interview with Mary Hodges, trying to slot all the moving parts of this untidy, perplexing case into place. “I was so sure,” he said, when the Inspector returned, “that finding out what Joshua quarreled with his father about would make sense of everything, somehow. But if it does, I don’t see how.”

“That’s why it doesn’t pay to be too cock-a-hoop in this job,” said Lamb. “Not that I don’t think it may yet lead us in the right direction, but a book kept under glass for years? As a motive for murder it doesn’t sound like much.”

“A book apparently worth five thousand pounds to somebody,” said Frank, shaking out his hand. “I don’t want to badger an old man, but I’m not coming back from Lancashire without finding out the buyer’s name.”

“You won’t have to. The thing’s important to Aziraphale if to nobody else, and he’ll be there well before you. Though I’m damned if I see how it fits!”

“I think I see a kind of shape, but making a theory out of it’s like trying to track a wave on the ocean.”

“Hmph. A poetical thought that takes us nowhere. Your car should be ready by now. Better get a move on - oh, what now!”

The PC who had knocked on the door took this as permission to stick his head in. “Begging your pardon, Inspector, but there’s a couple of ladies here that insist you’ll want to see them, though they haven’t been sent for and don’t have an appointment.”

“Do they have names, at least?”

“Miss Maud Silver and Mrs Gabriel Fell.”

Frank came to attention and Lamb suddenly looked less grumpy. “Ruth Fell? Send her in, yes, and call down to Missing Persons, tell ‘em she’s here. Her husband reported her missing first thing this morning. Any children with ‘em?”

The PC answered in the negative and withdrew. Frank and Lamb looked at each other. “Better wait a minute before you take off in the car,” said the Inspector, and Frank agreed, though his right hand did not.

“Has there been anyone named Silver in the case before?” Frank asked. 

“It sounds familiar, but not from this case. I think - come in, come in, ladies!”

“Good morning.” The woman who came first through the door was a dumpy, cheerful, governessy-looking creature, with her hair fringed and curled in front and controlled by a net behind, in a respectable but not especially becoming frock of brown wool, ornamented by a bog oak brooch in the shape of a rose with a pearl in its heart. She carried a bag with knitting needles emerging from the top. Ruth Fell followed close behind her, dressed in black and clutching her handbag. “Thank you so much for seeing us,” said the governessy woman. “My name is Miss Maud Silver. I am a private enquiry agent, to whom Mrs Fell came when she had a difficulty. I have advised her that her best way forward is to tell the police what she told me yesterday, and she has agreed to do so, but has asked me to be present while she does. I trust this is agreeable?”

Frank wanted to laugh, and wondered whether he was about to find out what hysteria felt like. At least, looking at Ruth Fell’s face, he was reasonably sure that the case would not expand to include the murder of children, for her features conveyed far more determination than fear or dismay.

“I have no objection, if it makes Mrs Fell comfortable,” said Inspector Lamb, “though I should think a solicitor would be more comforting than, ahem, even the most respectable private enquiry agent. Pray be seated, both of you. I’m sorry we have not more comfortable chairs.”

“I know two solicitors,” said Mrs Fell, taking one chair and folding her hands over her handbag in her lap. “One I don’t trust, and the other seems to have gone to Lancashire, which makes me all the more anxious to speak to you.”

Miss Silver removed her knitting - it appeared to be a white jumper with cherry stripes - from her bag and picked it up where she had last left off, completing Frank’s sense of having wandered into an absurdist play. He gave his abused hand one more shake and picked up his notebook. He would need to obtain a fresh one on his way out to the car.

“We’re very anxious to hear what you have to say,” said Inspector Lamb. “Have you called your husband yet? You gave him quite a fright.”

“No,” said Mrs Fell. “When I’ve explained you’ll see why that wouldn’t do at all.”

“And your children? You know where they are, and that they are safe and well?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, that’s why we didn’t come in last night. We had to see that they were safe before I could tell you anything.”

“The person we have placed them with is absolutely reliable,” said Miss Silver. “An old acquaintance of mine from my days in pedagogy, who has several other children in charge. A very desirable situation, I assure you, healthy and cheerful. They can safely remain there until this, ahem, very disagreeable business is cleared up.”

“I am glad to hear it,” said the Inspector, with bluff sincerity. “Please tell us what you have to say, Mrs Fell.”

Ruth Fell swallowed, shifted as if to straighten her already erect posture, and said: “I need to confess my part in a crime, in order to explain to you the most probable reason why my brother-in-law died.”
--
Crowley and Aziraphale were having lunch at the Auldmon Arms when the Lagonda pulled into town and parked beside the Bentley. The pub, like all the buildings on the High Street, had a bow window and of course they had been seated there, with a view of the War Memorial erected some years ago, so Aziraphale was able to see it arrive and signal to Sammy Device, who brought out two more plates of hotpot, the only dish served at the Auldmon Arms in the cold months, in time to put them, steaming, in front of Mickey and Uriel as soon as they sat down. Something happened to Mickey’s face that Aziraphale had seldom seen before, and which he presumed neither Crowley nor Uriel had ever seen at all. “Oh, my stars, thank you,” she said to Sammy. “I haven’t even smelled this for twenty years.”

Sammy grinned all over his face. “Welcome home, ma’am. Drinks?”

Two more half pints of dark brown ale having been received, Mickey fell upon, and Uriel curiously tasted, lunch. Crowley sprawled against the back of the settle, apparently watching the intermittent drizzle and the quiet of the High Street in the middle of the working day, while Aziraphale, comfortably full, nibbled at the creamy cheese that had come with the stew. “It’s - nice,” said Uriel, uncertainly.

“It won’t taste as good to you as it does to me,” said Mickey. “It’s nothing but mutton, onion, and potatoes - or turnips, sometimes. But we’d have it in the nursery on cold nights when Pater was in Milltown, and Nanny Shadwell would tell us ghost stories, and Raffles would fall asleep on the tablecloth. Nanny weaned the lot of us on it. It’s a miserable day, the village looks deserted, we’ve passed three empty farms, Raffles and the Lamb are dead, and whatever else happens we’ll have at least one unpleasant conversation when we get to the Abbey, probably many more, but by God there is hotpot, and Nanny loved us and we were all together, once.”

“Well put,” said Aziraphale, who since they stopped moving had begun to have a cold and heavy feeling in his belly, only partly caused by the sight of the monument to all the men he hadn't kept alive, and which the hotpot had only partially relieved. “Take your time and eat your fill. Sammy has plenty more.”

“You know, it’s not a hard recipe,” said Crowley, sprawling a bit more so that his back rested against Aziraphale’s arm. “There’s no reason you can’t have it in London.”

Mickey held up the hand that wasn’t spooning up hotpot and counted down between bites. “One. My cook is French-trained and would have a fit. Two. The mutton you get in town is too fat - it has to be scraggy enough to cook all day long. Three, you can’t get the right potatoes. Four, Cap’n Dick despises turnips, which I grant you only matters when he’s home, and so does the cook, which matters all year round. And five - on an electric range in a stainless steel pan? It wouldn’t come out right.”

“Anathema makes hotpot sometimes,” said Crowley. “She made it for Magdala and Josh. But of course, Anathema is a Device and a witch, so I expect that makes a difference.”

“Sammy,” Aziraphale called, “do you remember that time a mortar took out a flock of sheep and we stuffed everybody with hotpot?”

Sammy grinned. “Best meal we had all War.  You can burn Army rations and they still won’t be properly hot. No, sir, I won’t forget that any time soon.”

Mickey began her second bowl of hotpot while Uriel finished her first and ate steadily away at the cheese, which she declared very good, in a subdued, carefully neutral voice. Poor child. She had blamed Crowley for her father’s death for a long time, and possibly still did. There was no telling what she and Mickey had been saying to each other all this long drive. How long had it been, since she’d been allowed to have an emotion? “Have you ever been to the Abbey before?” Aziraphale asked her.

She shook her head.

“I’m afraid we’ll find it sadly decayed. Sammy says it’s going to the dogs, and he wouldn’t say that lightly.”

“I remember the first time I saw it, I thought it was bigger than Buckingham Palace,” said Crowley, sunglasses still firmly directed out the window. “That was before I ever saw Buckingham Palace, of course.”

“Even then, the west wing wasn’t usable,” said Aziraphale. “It must be in a dreadful state by now.  But I was so excited for Crowley to see everything. Even Gabriel had never brought a friend home from school for the holidays, and it felt like a triumphant homecoming, even apart from wanting him to see everything and meet the Lamb.”

“It was the first ride in a car I’d ever had, and all these dogs ran out to meet us, and Mrs Device and Mr Samuels were pleased to see me because I was with Master Aziraphale,” said Crowley, “but then we went in and it was barely warmer in the corridors than outside. He took me straight to the library to see His Book, and it was so cold in there it hurt. Because Lord Auldmon was afraid Aziraphale’d hole up reading in a warm library instead of doing the things Lord Auldmon thought he should do, so he told Mr Samuels not to light the fire until adult guests started arriving. Real guests. Not just his children.”

“Now, dear boy,” said Aziraphale. “You’re always so hard on him.”

“Because he’s always so hard on you,” said Crowley. “The lot of you, really, but it’s the way he treated you and Josh that always got up my nose.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mickey. “They’ve always been his favorites.”

“Then you have my sympathies, too, not that you want them. The point is - there’s things Uriel’d have a right to in any sensible universe that she never got; but she also didn’t have to deal with things that she’s better off missing. As long as she’s along on this ride, she ought to know that. I dunno what we’re going to find when we get there, but the rest of us will at least have a context for it and what it means to us.”

“It won’t mean anything to me,” said Uriel. “I’m Mrs Hostmassif’s personal secretary, that’s all.”

She had her professional mask up, still and heavy as gold, and Aziraphale’s heart ached for the little girl who used to chase Angie, giggling, around the Grimsby flat. But she had to share space with a thousand other aches, and Mickey’s spoon scraped the bottom of her bowl. “Whatever we’re going to find, we should go find it,” he said. “It won’t get any easier for putting it off.”

“We need to be a united front when we go in,” said Mickey. “Not let Uncle Matt or anybody sidetrack us onto other issues. We need to see Pater with our own eyes, and find out what on earth led to the sale of Aziraphale’s book, and what we learn will dictate our next move. Sunshine and I will take the lead and you two will back us up. Crowley, in particular, needs to keep his mouth shut unless there’s a legal point to raise.”

Aziraphale bristled. “Oh, come now!”

“It’s not his business and he’s irritating.”

Aziraphale opened his mouth, but Crowley unslouched and turned away from the window. “S’all right,” he said. “I can be irritating, when the occasion calls for it, but for now I can be your solicitor.” 

Crowley paid, with his usual large gratuity, and they resumed their hats and overcoats and went out to the waiting cars. The Bentley deferred to the Lagonda and Mickey’s precedence in age, Crowley grumbling the whole way about the slow pace she set, driving with one hand and holding Aziraphale’s with the other. This will be almost as hard for him as it will for Mickey and me, Aziraphale thought. And I very much doubt that he’ll understand why, or is at all prepared for it. And with the dominos falling on top of everything else - oh, I hope that wasn’t a mistake, but even if it wasn’t - the thought devolved into an image, of a mountain before them still to get over, and either peace or unending nightmare on the other side.

Crowley made an odd, vowelless sound when the Abbey came into view. The drive had not been raked recently and the gravel was bare in spots. The west wing looked even worse than anticipated, the roof bowed like a broken-down horse’s back and the glass out of several of the windows. Light shone in Pater’s room, above and to the left of the pediment above the front door, which was a good sign, as it ought to mean he was awake. No other life showed anywhere. The last of the dogs had been so sick they’d put her down three years ago, the last horses had been sold off in 1930, and apparently the birds had already stripped all the good they could out of the cold brown lawn, for there wasn’t a single one in sight. He wasn’t aware of having a reaction, but Crowley squeezed his hand. 

“I’m all right,” Aziraphale assured him.

“No you’re not. And you don’t have to be. It’s been a hideous week and it won’t get any better in the next half hour. But I’m right here with you, and Mickey’s on our side, and whatever terrible thing is going on here we’ll come out of it intact.”

And then we’ll deal with the cascade of dominos, Aziraphale thought. He squeezed Crowley’s hand back and said: “Of course we will.”

Mickey parked directly in front of the steps. Crowley parked behind her. “We’ll all stop at the Lesleys’ afterward, show him the cars,” he said. “He’ll like them. Ready?”

“Ready,” said Aziraphale. 

Four car doors opened in admirable synchrony and they climbed the steps in pairs: Mickey and Aziraphale ahead, Uriel and Crowley behind them. The door opened as Mickey reached for the bell, and the housekeeper from Cheshire said, in a dry cold voice: “Welcome home, Mrs Hostmassif, Master Aziraphale. We’ve been expecting you.” She was a beat too long in stepping back out of their way.

“Have you, Mrs Danvers? I suppose Bolt called to give you a head’s up.” Mickey did not hesitate to step inside and the rest followed her in good order, surrendering coats and hats. If the bareness of the welcome disturbed Mickey, she didn’t show it. It felt wrong to Aziraphale, though Mr Samuels had been dead ten years now and never been replaced, and Aziraphale knew that they were down to one footman, three housemaids, and the new cook. “We’re here to see Pater. I know the way.”

“Dr Fell says he’s not to be disturbed.”

“Dr Fell has been saying that for five years,” said Mickey, leading the way up the stairs. “I don’t know why a visit from his children should be as disturbing as all that. If he’s asleep, we’ll sit by his bed until he wakes up.”

The first floor corridor was lit only by a bulb at the top of the stairs and a lamp on the table by Pater’s door, which Uncle Matt blocked. He had presumably seen them drive up and taken station, but the notion struck Aziraphale that he had stood there continuously, cutting Pater off from the world, ever since the stroke. Uncle Matt was not much younger than Pater, and, though stockily built like Sandalphon and Aziraphale himself, he had shrunk with the years, and had never had the strength of the Infant Hercules. His voice sounded as if it had been stripped, only a single fragile layer left behind to serve him, but it was the layer containing the entirety of a doctor’s authority. “Good afternoon,” he said. “Sandy warned me that you were coming down in a mood, Sunshine, but I wasn’t expecting Mickey. Your father is in no state to be disturbed today, but Gabriel and Sandy will be along shortly, and they’ll be able to address all your concerns.”

Mickey did not so much smile as bare her teeth. “No, they won’t,”she said. “But what will, is you standing aside so we can see him for ourselves. We promise we’ll sit quietly until he wakes. We can have a nice chat with who ever’s on duty, give them a bit of a break. Sunshine could read something soothing to him.”

“Today is not a good day for this tomfoolery.”

“I don’t think you understand our position, here,” said Mickey. “When was the last time you saw Pater, Sunshine?”

“The day after his stroke, in 1929.” Aziraphale remembered it, far too vividly; Atlas, dropped at his post and the world tumbling down, half of his face slipping like melted wax, mouth mumbling after words and unable to shape them.

“The same for me. Do you remember the last time the Lamb got in to see him? Before Monday?”

“That was well before the stroke. He was abroad at the time, you’ll remember, hurried over as soon as he got the telegram, got here on the third day, and was refused admittance. Prior to that it had been four months, when he came to Pater’s birthday.”

“We were all refused admittance from that point on,” said Mickey. “Everyone but Bolt and Sandy. I’m not counting the trio of wives you’ve been overworking as nurses for five years, Uncle Matt. All our suggestions about taking him to a hospital or a care home, our offers to bring in professional nurses, to relieve the watch at his bedside, have all been repeatedly brushed off. He’s apparently well enough to conduct business, to refuse adequate care, and to decide to break his word, but not to see any of us for even a few moments.”

“It’s not my fault you lot cleared out,” said Uncle Matt. “We live with his condition day in and day out while you enjoy yourselves in London. While Joshua gallivanted all around Europe, sending letters that caused his father great anxiety. And then Joshua had the nerve to break in and shout at him - and then took himself off to be murdered - your father is prostrated, and no wonder.”

“Bollocks. We don’t believe you have his best interests at heart anymore,” said Mickey. “Even if you do, we not convinced that you are competent to be in sole charge of his care. We’ve been told by multiple servants over the years that they aren’t allowed in, for any reason. He hasn’t seen any faces but you six for five years. Five! Years! And now we learn that he broke a solemn promise and sold Aziraphale’s inheritance out from under him? This is not like him, this is not satisfactory, and we have been patient with the situation for much too long.”

“Crowley,” said Aziraphale, who was sufficiently well-versed in drama to recognize a cue, “how difficult would it be to get a court order requiring Uncle Matt to allow us to enter that room, in the company of a doctor of our choosing, competent to conduct an examination and render a second opinion?”

“It wouldn’t be,” said Crowley. “I brought the necessary documents with me. We could go over to Milltown, rouse up a judge I know, get it done tonight, be back bright and early tomorrow  morning, assuming we could find a doctor who’s free. I brought enough cash to make most doctors feel liberated enough to make a single house call. Honestly I think we should’ve done it before we came here. Save steps. But I’m not calling the shots.”

“We don’t want to do anything so drastic,” said Mickey menacingly. “We don’t want outsiders all over family business any more than you do. So let us in.”

Uncle Matt folded his arms. “No. I refuse to be intimidated. I did not want to say this, but I see it’s necessary. Your father, when informed of your intention to come here, explicitly stated that he does not wish to see any of you at this time. He is the head of the family and I must abide by his wishes. So do you.”

“Only if he tells us his wishes to our faces,” said Mickey. “You don’t seem to understand that we are not taking your word for anything anymore.”

“And you do not seem to understand that I cannot let you in.” Uncle Matt’s single-layer voice wavered in his throat, and he sounded even older than he was. “He’s my brother, dammit! Do you think I like this situation? No! But I’ve respected the authority of the head of the family and done my part to maintain stability and order since the day I was born and I’m not changing that now. The Estate is not descending into chaos while I have anything to say about it.”

Aziraphale sighed. He’d been afraid it would come to this. He stepped forward, embraced Uncle Matt, and lifted him off of his feet.

Uncle Matt tried to dodge him, of course; but that only allowed Uriel to dart past and seize the doorknob. “Locked!” 

Uncle Matt struggled in Aziraphale’s arms as Mickey tapped on the door panel. “Janey! Ruth! Aunt Ann! Let us in, or we’ll make a great deal more racket than is good for your patient.”

“Janey, don’t you dare!” Uncle Matt shouted, as well as he could. Aziraphale was trying not to restrict his air flow, but the old man was not making it easy on him.

“Please, Janey,” called Crowley.

“I will send your boys to India!” Uncle Matt made a tolerable effort at bellowing, as the door swung open. 

Uriel, Mickey, and Crowley fairly tumbled in. Aziraphale spun around (glimpsing Aunt Ann trudging urgently up the stairs), set Uncle Matt down, and stepped in backwards after him. Janey slammed the door shut, turned the key, shoved it into the pocket of her frock, and shouted through the door: “Michael’s twenty-one now! You can’t send him anywhere anymore!”

“Thank you, dear,” Aziraphale said to her, giving her a hug (she looked at the end of her rope, poor thing) before he turned, and beheld the empty bed.

Chapter Text

When all of the demons abroad in the land were gathered into the forecourt of the planned Temple, Solomon called upon the angels to confine them into his ring, to serve Israel and, through Israel, God; and Michael and Gabriel stood before him to praise his wisdom and proclaim the glory of God. But while they spread their wings, and splendor fell all around them, and Solomon wondered at the spectacle,  the Angel Aziraphale bent his back to his work, and ushered each demon in turn into the place prepared for them in the ring; but the Serpent laid his head low, coiled himself tight, and hid among the workmen’s tools. For two days and two nights, the Archangels conversed and Solomon listened and beheld them with joy, while Aziraphale labored; and whether he noticed the Serpent, or whether he did not, nine hundred ninety-nine demons awaited the will of the king, couched in his ring, but the thousandth slithered away.

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

“Aziraphale?”

“Yes, Lamb?”

“You and Crowley -“

“Yes?”

“And Mr Cortese and Mr Harrison -“

“Feel free to add a verb at any time.”

Joshua huffed from the next bunk. Up near the bow, Mr Cortese snored softly. “I’m having trouble finding the right one.”

“Do you need suggestions? I know lots of verbs.”

Joshua laughed briefly. “People say - they way you are - together - that it’s unnatural.”

“Ah. Well. It always felt perfectly natural to me. When I tried to think about kissing a woman was when I felt squirmy - so I never think about that anymore. Honestly, I think that argument is only an attempt to make ‘ew, I would never want to do that’ sound a little less childish.”

The laugh was easier this time.  “All right. I can see that. But - you could go to gaol for it. All the same.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help that. It used to trouble me, because I felt it was my duty - well, Pater was clear that it was my duty - to marry and have children. But after the War, I found that I didn’t agree with him on that point. Given my proclivities, my highest duty to any woman I might marry must be, not to marry her! As for the law, I can’t help regarding it as being something like a sumptuary law. You’re familiar with those, I suppose.”

“Laws against wearing certain things if you don’t have a certain rank, purple and ermine reserved for the crown and so on. But those never work. Because fashions change, and economies change, and people like dressing up, and it doesn’t really matter, what people wear, only what they do.”

“Just so. Making a law doesn’t change who I am and if someday Crowley and I must do hard labor for being who we are - well, we must, unless we’re willing to flee to the Continent, because the law can’t enable us to change. It’s a stupid and unjust law, but we live under it and must do the best we can.”

“But - how do you know? That you have to risk it? That you can’t change?”

“Well, in my case - when the other boys were dreaming of beautiful women, and admiring actresses, I was admiring actors, and dreaming about Crowley, and feeling unpleasantly squirmy when I imagined my supposed future domestic life.”

“What if you admire, and dream about, about women and men?”

“Then I suppose you have the world to choose from, theoretically. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Someday, probably, you’ll fall in love, and then the rest of the world won’t matter for those purposes. There’s only so much control you can have over that.”

“Mm. S’pose so. When you said, after the War, about your injury - are you better, or -?”

“Oh, that was a bald-faced lie, at the level I intended it to be understood. But it was all in a good cause, and only untrue in the strictest sense, because my goodness, I would be a huge disappointment as a husband to a woman! It wouldn’t be fair to her at all. That was always the squirmiest bit, you see. I don’t mind lying in a good cause, but hiding your true self from your spouse is as bad a cause as I can imagine.” Aziraphale cleared his throat. “Just as a point of information, however, there are any number of ways to express physical affection that don’t actually involve -“

“Oh, for God’s sake,” rumbled Mr Harrison out of the dark near the bow. “He’s a bit old for the Talk, but if you’re going to give it to him, take him up on deck!”

Whereat Joshua laughed and laughed, trying to muffle himself with his thin pillow.
---

Deep green and brown, reaching into the light -

“Crowley? Crowley? My dear boy, it’s time to go.”

“Go? Oh. Right. The inquest.” Crowley shook his head, blinking Angel’s face into focus. He was not smiling. Of course he wasn’t. Nothing to smile about. He was not the sun, right now; he was the cloud before the sun, soft and dim, hiding the radiance away. He had only holiday clothing to wear, but had obtained a black armband. Crowley had one, too. He couldn’t remember putting it on, but there it was. “Yes. I’m ready. Let’s go.” 

He wasn’t standing up, though. Why wasn’t he standing up? Aziraphale took hold of his hands, and pulled him to his feet. The houseboat breathed beneath them as they made their way to the ladder and up onto the deck, where Joshua waited, and Mildred, and Angie; Harrison at a discreet distance, Cortese already in the little boat, waiting to take them ashore. “You all right, Angie?” Crowley asked.

She nodded solemnly. “Will Uriel come back? After the inquest?”

“I don’t know,” said Crowley. 

“She might not want to. She may not like boats as much as she did before,” said Angel. “I don’t think we can blame her for that. But we can ask if she’d like you to visit her at the hotel.”

Angie nodded. Mildred kissed her and told her to be good for Mr Harrison, who said he preferred naughty children but under the circumstances wouldn’t require it. She climbed down first, looking odd and out of place in the outfit she’d brought for Sundays, navy blue with a dropped waist and pleats, and a narrow-brimmed hat hugging her bobbed hair. She sat in the stern with feet and knees primly together, and Josh sat beside her, leaving Aziraphale on his own in the bow and Mr Cortese and Crowley to pull the oars in the middle. Mr Cortese had gone gray and grown a beard, barely recognizable as the tutor of those long-ago holidays, face weathered, hands callused as well as ink-stained.

Crowley was not much of a rower, but he pulled his oar, grateful to have it, not looking at the water which sparkled and shifted around them, not thinking of how the sparkles faded and darkened around a slack face retreating downward, hands drifting.

Pull. Shoulder to shoulder with Cortese, pull together. Don’t dip too deep, nor yet too shallow. Pull. Feel the rhythm. Pull.

The rhythm of the train beat against the soles of Crowley’s shoes. He sat across from Ligur, alone together in the compartment. “Where’s Froggy, then?”

“Business in town. Believe it or not we aren’t joined at the hip. Don’t call him Froggy.”

“I’ll call him Hastur when he calls me Crowley.”

“Or when he’s not around to make a point to.”

“All right, if it bothers you. You’re awfully glum for a man going on holiday. What’s the matter?”

“Do you care?”

“Possibly not, but it makes conversation.”

They sit on hard chairs in a row. At the front is a bench with men on it, men with weathered faces, hands hard from rowing and farming. The inquest room is bright and warm. Crowley’s hands shake. Ligur is sinking, sinking, sinking, his hat gone, his shirt pale in the green water. Joshua is heavy, above him, in the light.

“If something bad happens to me - let it be.”

“What?”

“I mean, it’s not as if we liked each other.”

“What’s that got to do with anything? What are you talking about?” 

Aziraphale is talking. A doctor is talking. Cortese is talking. Mildred is talking. Joshua is talking and his voice has gone shrill and shaky. The row of weathered men, stiff and solemn in their best clothes, are listening. Crowley needs a cigarette, but no one else is smoking. It would be rude to mar the clear August light with smoke. He presses his hands against his knees, but instead of his knees damping out the shakes, they start to vibrate, too. Ligur’s boater, with the multicolored ribbons Uriel wove together into a hatband for him, floats on sparkling water.

“Old Mr Prince was talking to me. About Uriel’s future. Like it’s any business of his.”

“Awkward. Not like you can tell him to push off.”

“He said, Miss Dagon won’t last forever.”

“Neither will he. I expect he’ll have shuffled off the mortal coil long before she retires. And Uriel’s got better things to do with her life than to think about turning into Miss Dagon.”

“That’s what I told him. He told me he can get her into a good school.”

“You don’t need him for that.”

“That’s just it, though. I do, if he tells me I do.”

“Crowley. They want you now, dear boy. Are you up to it? I can -“

“I’m up to anything I need to be up to,” says Crowley. He stumbles as he rises; the swagger doesn’t work; the walk to the chair between the coroner and the jury is long, and then it’s over. Listening to questions and answering them is hard work. His head hurts. Mickey and Hastur sit, side-by-side, in chairs at the back of the room. When did Mickey and Hastur get here? Who’s looking after Uriel? That poor kid.

 “We came down together for the weekend...Known him a, quite a long time....we were beneficiaries of the same charitable foundation at school and are both still involved in it now we’re grown up and solvent...mostly saw him around town and at Foundation functions...don’t think I’d ever seen him around water before...he told me he’d never been in a sailing boat, but he never mentioned that he couldn’t swim...Yeah, I passed him a cork vest, but he never put it on...No, thanks, but, if I could, could smoke a little...Thank you sir...” The smoke tainted the air and he was ashamed of it, but it took the shakes out. Reduced them, at least, to manageable size. He wanted a drink. “I was on the other side of the mast from him, on the, what-you-call-it, the starboard side...I heard Josh call out, yes, about the same time as the boom came around...very sudden...He - he started to stand instead of ducking - I think - I don’t know, maybe he misunderstood the warning? - stood right up into it- it knocked him over - Big splash...No, I’m all right, give me a moment.”

He breathes and smokes and Ligur falls down and down and down.

“So Aziraphale was busy getting things under control, and somebody - I had to do something with a rope, I didn’t see who threw the life ring out but then Uriel started screaming and Joshua shouted something about, told him to stop flailing - there was a lot of splashing - and then he said, I think he said, ‘Oh, crackers, he can’t swim,’ I think, and he was on that side so he jumped out. Which meant the boat was too light on that side, so I slipped around the mast to even things out.” He takes a long drag on the cigarette. “It was like - they were fighting...Panicking, yes, I guess so...I mean, his little girl was screaming, wasn’t she? It looked like, like he was climbing Josh, pulling him down to climb on top of him but that wasn’t going to work, was it? And then they both went right down...out of sight, yes...They were - I think they were - right under the surface, all tangled up together, like, and, and - I swear, Josh had stopped moving, but Ligur still was and then -“

“If something bad happens to me - let it be.”

“I got hold of Joshua and I, I may have pushed against Ligur and sent him further down, I’m not sure, but Joshua was drowned already, I had to, had to get a hold of him and go up...Yes, Aziraphale, when we were all kids on holiday, same place I learned to swim, we learned lifesaving, all of us together. And - Josh wasn’t fighting. Limp as a dishrag. I couldn’t - I stayed in the water, tried to push him back into the boat and that wasn’t working, even though they’d taken the sail down or something and it wasn’t moving about anymore - Aziraphale hauled him in and I dived back down...I could still see him. Ligur, I mean. It was dark, he’d fallen into the dark, but his clothes were light, I could still see him.  I dived, and I dived, and he kept - he just fell away, into the dark.” He stops, and smokes, and watches Ligur fall.

“We were never slaves, you know.”

“I never thought one way or another about it.”

“My people - on my mother’s side, we went way back. I mean, waaay back. Not like toffs, with a pedigree, but I could probably prove it if I wanted to go wading through parish registers and things. My mum told me, we were here when Elizabeth was queen. What they called strolling players. Entertainers, you know, at innyards and suchlike. Wouldn’t be surprised if one of us played Othello. Good Queen Bess passed an ordinance once, trying to limit the movements of strolling players and vagabonds and blackamoors - it says blackamoors right there in the law, and that was us. We were never rich but we were always English. And on my father’s side, he was Indian. Some mid-level native toff, I guess, came to school here and went home. I think he used to send Mum money, but then she fell under that cab and they took me off and I guess nobody sent him a forwarding address. Wish I knew his name, but I was too little, really. But I was old enough to know that. That we were never rich, on Mum’s side, but we were never slaves. Not until me.”

“You’re not -“

“I am, and so are you. Slaves to the ruddy Foundation, that’s us. But Uriel won’t be. Not ever.” 

They are done with him. He walks back to the row. Mildred holds his hand on one side, Angel on the other. The trembling stills at last. “Mickey and Hastur are here,” he whispers to Angel. “Why are they here?”

“If I drowned, away from you, you’d be at the inquest,” answers Angel. But you can’t compare him and Angel with Ligur and Froggy, Ligur and Mickey. And it means they left Uriel with somebody, at the hotel, that she’s alone while the jury discusses how her father died.

“After Uriel had that so-called accident, Hastur told me, he said, Mr B could have an accident, too. Just say the word, mate, he said. I didn’t say the word. I wanted to. But they would have - I don’t know. Killed her, I expect. But I think - it’s got back to them - that it was even mentioned. I think, it’ll be me or Froggy. Probably Froggy. But if it’s Froggy, they still have me and Uriel. But if it’s me -

The coroner talks. The jury goes out. The jury comes in again. Accidental death due to inexperience and failure to equip properly, and a strong statement on the importance of wearing lifesaving gear such as cork vests, especially for non-swimmers, on boats. 

Hastur objects. Hastur objects loudly. Hastur is ushered out by Mickey and a bailiff. Is it a bailiff, at an inquest? Crowley feels he ought to know that, sort of thing a solicitor ought to know, and he doesn’t. One of far too many things he doesn’t know. Joshua and Crowley are commended for their prompt action, Crowley for his courage in repeatedly attempting to retrieve Mr Ligur. Crowley makes a harsh sound in his throat and shakes his head. 

“If something bad happens to me - let it be.”
---

Cortese was rowing Mildred and Angie toward the hotel, to stay with Uriel overnight and to go back to town with her, Mickey, and Hastur the next day. No one was in a holiday mood anymore. The long summer twilight lay over the lake, and down below Harrison and Joshua cooked sausages, potatoes, and spinach. Crowley sat in a deck chair in the stern, one hand holding his spare dark glasses, one hand holding Angel’s, the eye that Hastur didn’t blacken fixed on the point at which the evening star would appear, when it appeared. He had told Angel all about what Old Mr Prince had said after the dinner, the same night that it was said. Now he told him what Ligur said on the train. How he had deliberately stood up as the boom came around.

“Surely not,” said Angel. “Not in front of Uriel!”

“You don’t grasp how ruthless Ligur was, underneath. He saw an opportunity, he took it. That’s how he got a Prince Scholarship. That’s how he made his money. That’s how he got Mickey. Whatever it took to meet the goal. That’s what he did here. If he had to scar Uriel for life, and drown Josh, himself, the whole lot of us, to keep her out of Old Mr Prince’s hands, he would.”

“And yet, he rebelled at the last,” Angel pointed out. “He did not want to die. He only changed his mind too late. You, and the Lamb for that matter, were incidental to that process.”

“I don’t think he did,” said Crowley. “I think his body panicked, but he - When he saw me - he looked me straight in the eye, let go of Josh, opened his mouth, and dropped like a rock. When he saw me, he remembered he’d done this on purpose, and he went ahead with it.”

“You did all you could to save him. And you did save Joshua, for which I am eternally grateful.”

Crowley gestured with the sunglasses. “No need for that. I - all right, he’s not actually my little brother, so if he’d died here I wouldn’t be as gutted as you, but I’d be pretty gutted. A lot more than I am about Ligur. He said it himself - we didn’t like each other. We were only caught in the same trap. Which he was afraid Uriel would be caught in, too. So he took the only way out he could think of. To free her. If she is free.”

“Obviously Uriel must never know anything about it, but we must tell Mickey,” said Angel. “She has a right to know, and - Mickey can keep her free, if she needs it. Trust her for that.”

“She can, anyway, make the game not worth the candle,” agreed Crowley. “Uriel’s not so valuable a potential asset that Old Mr Prince’d expend resources or take risks to keep her under his hand. If he can have her in reserve to pressure Hastur with, without paying for her upkeep, I expect that’d suit him fine.” He fidgeted with the glasses. Angel’s hand was heavy and soft, wrapped around his fingers. “Mr B said something odd when I left the office Friday.”

“Oh?”

“He said: Ligur’s going too, eh? He’s gotten very talkative lately, that Ligur. And he doesn’t know how to swim. Enjoy yourself.”

“That...is odd.”

“I think,” Crowley’s throat felt thick; he paused, cleared it, and started again. “I think, they suspected him of trying to get out. Of trying to, to turn State’s evidence, maybe? Trying to sic Hastur back on them? I’m not sure, but I think, that was what Uriel’s accident was about. But then they found, that made him less reliable, not more. He couldn’t sit easy on his chain anymore. If he hadn’t drowned this weekend, I think they might have - done something. To him. Or to her. Or maybe to Hastur or Mickey. Something to, to bring him back in line. I think they were dropping me a hint about that. To see if I’d take initiative in the matter. See if I could pull it off. And I think, I think I have to let them believe that I did.” He sighed, feeling the dark shadowy water rise in his own lungs. “I’m sorry, Angel.”

“Whatever for, dearest?”

“I promised you, you’d get what you want. You, me, together. Safe. And I can’t. As long as they threaten you they control me but there’s things, things I know I can’t do and you’re not safe -“

“Shhh.” The deck chairs faced the long way down the lake, and only a solitary sail had line of sight on them, its crew all focused on tacking back to their home harbor, against the wind. The raft of ducks did not care what they did. Angel lifted Crowley’s hand to his lips and kissed it. “Safety is an illusion, at the best of times, but it doesn’t do to be hypnotized by danger. If you cannot escape a trap, you must destroy it.”

“Ngk!” Crowley’s jaw dropped open. “Destroy? The Prince Foundation? Are you mad?”

“Not at all,” said Angel. “Think about it. What is the Foundation, really?”

“It’s a massive money making criminal machine feeding on poor boys that don’t know any better and turning them into men who can’t get out! And if we ever try to get out - some of those men are willing to kill people!”

“That’s what Old Mr Prince wants you to think, obviously, but you’re brighter than that. Foundations, corporations - families, even - countries, armies - they’re not real things. They’re gigantic networks of people held together in common cause, by common assumptions, common purposes, common loyalties, but Ligur’s loyalty wasn’t to the Foundation, but to his daughter; and he trusted you to see that, didn’t he?”

“We didn’t trust each other! We didn’t like each other!”

“One’s got nothing to do with the other. He did trust you. Not as much as he did Hastur, but who did he come to when Hastur couldn’t bring Uriel to him? You. And he sat opposite you in the train carriage, thinking about, about taking some chance to commit suicide in order to fill his duty to Uriel, and what did he realize? That if you saw him in danger you’d try to save him. That means both that he trusted you to look out for him and that he trusted you to understand what was in his heart, and help him gain his ends. And he is not the only Prince Boy to trust you, I know he’s not. All the younger Prince Boys - the ones I’ve met, anyway - they look up to you. They recognize you as someone within the organization whom they can trust. And if they can trust you, you can trust them.”

“I can’t though! Not enough of them! You’re talking about a revolution in the ranks, but we’d all have to, to, turn on Old Mr Prince at once, and not just the Boys, all the, the secondary boys like Erich, and all the assets like Hastur and everyone’s afraid of Old Mr Prince , somebody’d carry tales to him, and anyway why should they keep trusting me if they think I killed Ligur? it’s so -“

“I didn’t say it would be easy. And it wouldn’t have to be all at once, not really. It could start with the fringes, the people least under control; or maybe with the most dangerous ones, if they can be convinced that the Foundation doesn’t serve their best interests anymore and that they can get themselves out - and how many truly violent assets can they have, really? It’s a sizable organization, but it’s finite. I’m sure there’s a way. You’re very, very clever, dearest. You are good at solving problems. And you are surrounded by other very clever people. The only reason - no, listen! The only reason Old Mr Prince rules the Foundation’s members is that he convinced you all as boys that he could control every part of your lives and you would benefit from it and that everyone else in the network was absolutely loyal to him. That’s simply not true.”

Crowley thought of Ears, and Carruthers, and Smith; of the three Erichs, whose chief loyalty must be to each other; of Ian, who had not made the cut but who was to be apprenticed to a jeweler and had written to Crowley to tell him so. “It would take a dreadful long time,” he said.

Angel smiled at him. “Then we’d better get started.”

--
Crowley’s allowance for the quarter after Ligur died was enormous.

Ruth and Gabe married on All Soul’s Day. Crowley had bought a brand-new Hispano-Suiza, and he drove Aziraphale to the Abbey for the event, which - in the absence of American in-laws to impress - was much smaller than Gabe’s first wedding, though it was larger than Raffles-and-Ruth’s. Ruth was attended by Janey and some nurse friends, Gabe by Sandy and his brothers. (His surviving brothers.) Mickey came, but did not bring her boys, as there would have been no other children there. Sandy had decided within a week of coming home that his own were ready for prep school, to prep school they had gone, and in prep school they stayed. Janey had a terrible time smiling through the ceremony. Ruth herself did not look particularly happy, but she also did not look particularly sad. “Say the word, and we’ll whisk you off in my car,” Crowley offered, low-voiced, on greeting her. “Take you someplace they’ll never find you.”

“Oh, what nonsense you talk,” she said, with the faintest wispy shadow of a smile. “I’m all right. And it doesn’t matter, anyway.”

The book, safe under glass in the library, was very beautiful. Aziraphale read the visible text off to him and Joshua, translating as he went, pointing out bits of symbolism in the picture that had been mere decoration to them all as boys. Mr Samuels was visibly on his last legs, the new housekeeper Mrs Danvers a bit of a dragon, Lord Auldmon completely bald and somewhat tired-looking, but still hale, and well up to the task of letting his sons know that he was disappointed in them but that it was not too late to fulfill his expectations. 

All the servants - about half as many as had been considered necessary Before the War - drank the couple’s very good health. Crowley and Aziraphale danced with the nurses, one of whom was young enough for Lord Auldmon to try to steer her and Joshua together, and with Janey, who was very glum without her boys and pretending not to be. “There’s not much to do in Milltown,” she sighed. “Since Sandy came back and we moved back there, Mother Ann’s reduced their flock of chickens by half and they don’t look half as good as when I had the tending of them.” The factories were doing well, Ruth’s income from her late father was to be put into agricultural improvements and the electrification of cottages, Gabe had received a sizable stock dividend and discussed the west wing with an architect. He and Sandy had a number of suggestions for what Josh and Angel could do with the income they were to receive under their grandfather Sturgeon-Price’s will. They pretended to listen to these suggestions. Joshua intended to travel, Aziraphale to pay off the theater mortgage and begin the major improvements to the rental properties. He had a scheme for shuffling tenants around as the improvements proceeded, so that no one who wished to stay would be unhoused and everyone would wind up in a better place at a rent they could still afford.

If everyone assumed that the reason Aziraphale did not extend his visit past the day after the ceremony was that he had an appointment with a builder, that would probably be because it was easy to create that impression.

“Are you not going to tell me where we’re going in such haste?” Angel asked, as they zipped down every shortcut Crowley had worked out between the Abbey and Manchester.

“Nope,” said Crowley, tapping his horn to scatter a flock of sheep that shouldn’t have been crossing the road here anyway. “It’s a surprise, Angel!”

Once well south of Manchester, he consented to, if not slow down, at least stop a few times to stretch their legs. Angel, after all, did not have a war’s worth of practice at living behind a windscreen, and there was no need to face privation when every village had its tea shop. They even ate supper in Oxford, at an old favorite place that they were both happy to find still in operation, and where the cook remembered Angel (as cooks tended to do) and was happy to put together a box of sandwiches and pastry for them to take with them. But anticipation had Crowley by the throat, and Angel caught it from him. As the South Downs began rolling beneath their wheels he turned to Crowley with the air of one who has sorted it out. “Dearest! Did you manage to rent us a seaside place for Bonfire Day?”

“Nope!” Crowley laughed, even as Angel’s face descended into a pout. “Even better than that! Almost there. You be patient.”

“I don’t want to be patient. I want my surprise!”

“Oh, in that case!” Crowley grinned his evilest grin and mashed the accelerator to the floor, causing Angel to cry out and cling to his seat. 

The sun was setting when they pulled up to the five-barred gate, which Angel got out to open, and closed again behind them. “We’re here,” said Crowley, whipping around the stand of apple trees that hid the place from the road, and pulling up in front of the door. “What do you think?”

It was low, and thatched, and small. The windows were divided into twelve leaded panes apiece. The door was freshly painted blue. The barn was more of a shed. Once there had probably been a rather nice garden, but sheep had been through it recently. The downs rolled away at every hand, with not another house in sight. The sea wasn’t visible, either, but the horizon had the peculiar depthless light that only occurs where no land weighs it down, and the air tasted of salt. “You said you hadn’t rented -“

“I didn’t,” said Crowley, retrieving their cases from the boot. “We own it.”

“We what?”

“Dead old man nobody liked in a house nobody wanted, cash flow problems, bit of a legal muddle with agricultural leases, solicitor - that’s me - willing to take payment in kind - trust me, it all works out. Mildred helped.” He angled his coat pocket toward Angel. “Key’s in there - do the honors?”

Angel fished the key out, a big black iron thing on a big black ring. “That explains those times butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.” He inserted the key, and turned it (with one hand; Crowley needed two), stepping in with an air of eager anticipation.

What if he hated it? It was a bit of a tip, actually, now that they were on the spot. Crowley followed Angel into the single large room, floored with flagstones, furnished as the old man had left it, smelling of vinegar and old thatch and kerosene.  After the pink and orange sunset outside, it was very dark, so dark that he took off his glasses and dropped them into the pocket that had held the key. “Lamp’s on the left, there, ought to be full, light us up here and get a good look. Water’s by well, just out the back door there, earth closet behind the shed I’m afraid but the well’s good and see - pump over the sink, won’t have to haul buckets in and out. Those steps are to a sleeping loft - nice big bed. New mattress and bedding, saw to that myself. No electric, no gas, no telephone. Nobody within five miles except the adjacent landowner that’s renting the bit of pasture that came with the house - we passed their place on the way in - they’ll be leaving milk and eggs for us at the gate in the morning. Paid them up front for it. Stove’s all laid - let me get it lit.  Walls are nice and thick, once it warms up it’ll stay that way awhile, and here’s the pans to cook with. I’ve stocked a few bottles in that cupboard there, and we’ve got a deep dry cellar, plenty of room for anything we want to keep on hand. The old man left some home canning down there, but he didn’t label anything so we’ll be taking a chance if we eat any. When the stars come out it’s like you could climb on the roof and touch them - best viewing I’ve ever seen - thought I’d get myself a telescope, and we’d come out here for the Perseids. Village is off that way, I figure if they set off skyrockets we’ll probably see them but - no firecrackers going off all day, no artillery barrages at night. No one can see us. No servants. We don’t have to be tidy. We don’t have to be quiet. We don’t - Angel?”

Aziraphale, standing in the middle of the room during this recitation, put the lamp down in the middle of the much-scrubbed, slightly warped table, and turned to Crowley with his eyes shining and every line on his face crinkling into a smile, cheeks gone appley. “Oh my dearest,” he said, voice wavering between tears and laughter. “It’s perfect. It’s perfect!” Suddenly he had Crowley in his arms, scooped up off the floor, twirling him into a giddy, gravity-defying dance. “And you’re perfect!” They whirled all around the room three times, both laughing, Crowley’s limbs flying every which way until he got them wrapped around Angel, who staggered, still laughing, to a stop at the foot of the steps to the loft, but didn’t put him down. Crowley gazed down into his face, entranced.

“You are so beautiful,” he said, “that I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Don’t you really?” Angel asked. “A clever boy like you?” And kissed him.

Chapter Text

Then the angels called down fire and brimstone, the earth shook, and the sky grew dark upon the plain. When nothing remained of Sodom and Gomorrah, they looked about, and the Angel Sandalphon asked: “Were there not three cities? I am sure there were three cities.” The  other angels who had brought the fire and brimstone had never walked upon the earth before, and knew not, but the Angel Aziraphale said to them: “Oh, you needn’t worry about Zoar! I took care of it.” Then the angels were satisfied, and returned to Heaven, leaving Aziraphale to mind his appointed sphere, and when he was certain that they were gone, he withdrew the shadows of his wings from over Zoar, which alone of the cities of the plain was small enough for him to hide. He feared lest one of his fellows look down and see that he had sheltered sinners, but in his heart could regret only that his wings were no larger than they were.

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

“My father-in-law, Michael Fell IV, Lord Auldmon, died in 1929,” said Ruth Fell, and sagged like someone who has just laid down an enormous burden. “There. Gabriel makes everything so complicated, and talks at me until I feel like the stupidest, most confused person in the world, until it’s easiest to just tell him yes, of course he’s right so I can get away from him. I feel as though I’ve been asleep since Raffles died, and Gabriel’s been piling pillows on my head. But it’s simple, now that I’ve woken up and pushed the pillows off. Uncle Auldmon’s dead, Gabriel’s Lord Auldmon, I’m Lady Auldmon, and the only reason not to say it is that Gabriel can’t manage money and refuses to delegate to someone who can.” 

“Oh, good lord,” said Inspector Lamb. Frank’s pencil ceased the dance of the pothooks.  “Five years? You’ve all just - pretended to have a sick old man stowed away in the Abbey for five years?”

Miss Silver smiled benignly, her needles working away. “Very good, dear. Perhaps a little context as to why your husband felt this deception to be necessary, now?”

“Yes, of course.” Lady Auldmon (they would have to change her name in the files) straightened a little, her eyes brighter and more alive than the two policemen had seen them before; more alive, had they known it, than anyone had seen them for years. “Gabriel speculated heavily on the American stock exchange during what they call the Big Bull Market. At the time of his father’s death, we had just taken heavy losses in the market crash. We were at the Abbey trying to come to an arrangement with my father-in-law that would enable us to weather the losses without undue strain on the rather complicated financial network of the Estate when he had his stroke, so when my stepfather pronounced his brother dead, he came to us immediately. You’re familiar with the conditions of the Estate’s use of the properties Uncle Auldmon’s wives brought with them?”

“Yes, of course, that ended with his death,” said Lamb. “Half the factories belong to Mrs Hostmassif now, and Aziraphale can keep his rents. The Estate loses a considerable part of its income.”

“Exactly. Gabriel said the loss of income in combination with death duties and our personal losses were completely ruinous, but if we could only hang on a little longer while he recouped his losses -“ she shrugged, shaking her head. “And he’s kept us hanging on ever since.”

“Who is us here?” Lamb asked. “You, your husband, Dr Fell; obviously the other two family members nursing him -“

“And Sandy, yes. That’s all. I know it seems incredible, but - Gabriel’s the head of the family now and we’ve all been, been trained for so long that the head of the family’s word is law. And Sandy is personally devoted to him, and kept spouting law at Mother, Janey, and me, about how we couldn’t testify against our husbands and were obliged to follow their lead and so on. And then, there were the children. Sandy’s always kept Janey in line, making contact with her boys contingent on her following his rules, and though they’re about too old for that, they weren’t, when this started. While Phaela and Fiver are so young, still - and I, well, I couldn’t bear up under it. None of us could.”

“English law does have a discouraging effect on women who wish to oppose their husbands’ illegal activities,” observed Miss Silver, while performing some kind of legerdemain to change between cherry and white yarn on the jumper. “But in this case, I think if Ann and Jane Fell can be made to feel safe, they can also be brought to recognize that there is no legal restriction against their testifying against each other’s husbands, and that it is in fact their duty to do so. It is even possible that they have grounds for divorce, though the definition of mental cruelty so often depends on the judge, and that would create its own complications.”

Frank couldn’t contain himself any longer. “But what have you done with the body?”

“It’s in the cellar of the west wing,” said Ruth. “That part of the house has been in serious disrepair for years and really ought to be torn down. Nobody goes there. The cellar was cool and dry enough that winter that Uncle Michael mummified nicely. Raffles and I mummified a number of small animals in that cellar when we were having our Egyptian phase, and it worked even in the summer, so we were fairly confident about stowing him there, in a furniture crate, packed in rock salt. Dr Fell was certain that when we finally announced the death, he’d be able to keep the undertaker from talking. He’s a wrong-side-of-the-blanket cousin, you see.”

Lamb was visibly trying to keep his composure. “You realize, ma’am, that this provides your husband with a motive in the murder of his youngest brother. When Joshua gained access to the room, and found it empty, I doubt he was inclined to listen to Gabriel’s excuses.”

Ruth sighed. “I know. And there’s something else. Which is why I went to Miss Silver. I was tying myself into knots trying to keep things from touching in my head and it was driving me mad. I needed - I needed to put the whole thing to a third party. Somebody with no stake in the situation, who I could trust to identify the mountains and the molehills, and which things it really was my duty to tell the police. And she’s certain that this - is a mountain.”

“The police are all ears, ma’am.”

“On Monday night. During Mickey’s party. At some point while the servants were setting off skyrockets, I went upstairs, and on my way down I saw Sandy and Gabriel in the back hall. Sandy wasn’t wearing a coat but they seemed to have only just come inside. I said something about how late they were. Gabriel told me that they’d been delayed in Lancashire and it was not as late as all that. Then Sandy went into the front hall, rather than upstairs to get into costume, but I was missing the bonfire and didn’t think much of it.”

“While the servants were setting off skyrockets. About what time would that be?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? I had no reason to think it important and didn’t notice. But when he woke me up on Tuesday, and told me the Lamb was dead and the police wanted to talk to all of us, Gabriel asked what time I thought it was when I met him and Sandy in the hall, and I told him I guessed it was about a quarter to eleven. He insisted that it was much closer to nine, reminded me that my memory and sense of time are not good - well, he says they’re not good, he’s constantly correcting me on minor points like that till I don’t know whether I’m on my head or my heels - and told me he didn’t want me to create confusion by giving the police inaccurate information. I promised him that if I was asked about what time he got to the party I would be vague and simply say that he arrived late. And in the event, of course, you didn’t ask me. But there was no doubt in my mind that the fireworks were being let off and the bonfire lit when I saw them. Mickey and Miss Ligur will know what the time frame there was.”

“And you didn’t think it odd that your husband made so much of such a small point, with his brother dead?”

Ruth made a helpless gesture. “ I often have conversations like this with Gabriel. He’ll get a bee in his bonnet about something and nothing will do but that I must agree with him on it, especially if I don’t. It’s easiest to give in at once and say what he wants me to say so he’ll stop badgering me.”

It seemed to Frank that they were sailing straight past an obvious point. “You say Sandy went into the front hall of Mrs Hostmassif’s house? The front hall where they eventually found the keys to the bookshop, even though Mrs Hostmassif said she’d never had them?”

“Yes. I do say that. I also say, as I should have said when everyone was arguing about it, that Sandy insists on having copies of everybody’s keys. Mickey is not in on any of this. She’s been wanting control of her factories for years and would never have consented to let it go on for a day.”

“And the coat of whoever shot Joshua would be blood-spattered, and Sandalphon wasn’t wearing one. I wonder where it wound up,” said Inspector Lamb. “Blood stains are the very devil to get rid of, and so is blood-stained clothing.”

“No wonder Ga - Lord Auldmon’s having kittens about you vanishing,” said Frank. “You’ve been holding the whole case between your hands, if you would only allow yourself to put the pieces together. I suppose when he put you on the train you and the children simply got off again on the opposite platform?”

“That’s right. We met Miss Silver in the station’s tea shop and she took us to her friend’s house in a cab. The children hadn’t wanted to go to the Abbey at all. It’s no fun for them there, and they think it’s haunted. So they considered it a great lark to sneak off someplace else instead. Miss Silver’s friend’s house is in Kent, with large gardens and other children in residence and in the house next door. They should be safe and happy enough there until we get out of this dreadful mess and I know whether, when I know who in the family is going to gaol.” 

“Since all this information, taken together, puts the murder squarely at Gabriel and Sandalphon Fell’s door, the question arises, Inspector,” said Miss Silver, “what is the next step she should take, in order to bring the crime home to them and protect the remainder of the family? Clearly the pair are quite ruthless.”

“There’s at least three next steps, as far as the police are concerned,” said Lamb. “Lady Auldmon, are you willing to make a formal statement before a magistrate? I must inform you that I am not in position to offer you immunity, but given the circumstances of your participation in your husband’s fraud and the importance of your information in the solution to a murder, we can expect the magistrate to exercise leniency toward you. And I do recommend you obtain legal counsel as soon as you can.”

“I’ll be happy to give a statement, and I’ll keep trying to call Crowley. His office says he’s taken another day off and there’s no answer at the bookshop or his flat.”

“I don’t mind letting you know that we got a statement from a Miss Mary Hodges last night, concerning the theft of a valuable book - I suppose you know all about that, too?”

“She told? Oh, good for her! I know it’s been weighing on her mind. It’s been weighing on mine, too, but I’m afraid the sheer size of the sum offered made it seem possible that Gabriel really could get to a point where we could allow Uncle Michael to be dead at last, so I didn’t raise a fuss. But I used to hear Mary fretting about it as she worked.”

Frank, who had taken down Miss Hodges’s statement and was still feeling the effects in his hand, said: “Once she was sacked for talking to a reporter, she stopped fretting and unburdened herself. She told us Master Aziraphale, Mr Crowley, and Miss Michaela would drive up to Lancashire this morning to speak directly to Lord Auldmon about the matter.” He looked over at Lamb. “I really do need to get to Lancashire, now we know this. There’s no telling what will happen.”

“At this point the ruckus is likely to be over before you get there,” said Lamb, “and I’ll need you, and possibly another stout couple of lads, to help me arrest Gabriel and Sandalphon. We can call the locals to get out to the Abbey. The fraud is their business, anyhow. Given your knowledge of the principals, Lady Auldmon, is anyone likely to get violent when your sister- and brother-in-law gain access to the empty sickroom?”

“Oh, no. My mother and stepfather are well on in years, and Sandy’s the only one in our branch of the family who inherited the unusual strength. Janey wouldn’t say boo to a goose and will be as glad as I am to have the whole thing over.”

Miss Silver coughed, discreetly, but somehow with such authority that Frank found himself, and everyone else, looking at her. “Am I to understand that Mary Hodges took the information about this book directly to Mr Fell and Mrs Hostmassif, before coming to the police?”

“She took it to Fell, and Fell called Mrs Hostmassif,” said Lamb. “I gathered that their working theory is that Gabriel and Dr Fell were exerting undue influence on their father and they need to investigate and possibly start court proceedings on his behalf.”

“I have not, of course, met any of these people and have only the most imperfect conception of their characters, but - Lady Auldmon, dear - do you think that they would undertake this course of action before speaking to your husband about it?”

“Aziraphale would call Gabriel even before he called Mickey, I expect - Oh. Oh, dear.” Lady Auldmon, whose initial pallor had warmed and flushed to a more natural color during the course of her story, went pale again.

Lamb stood up. “Right,” he said, “we’ve lost enough time, I think.”

--
After they turned Lady Auldmon over to the magistrate; after they’d made an urgent call to the sole representative of law enforcement in Auldmon Village and been told that Ernie Shadwell was seeing to a complaint of sheep theft in the furthest reaches of his jurisdiction but that his daughter would head right out on her bicycle to tell him to go to the Abbey as fast as ever he could; after spending a weary time making the Milltown constabulary understand what was going on; after the servant engaged in putting everything in order for a possibly long vacancy at the Kensington house informed them that the master and his cousin had departed for Auldmon Abbey within a quarter of an hour of reporting Ruth and the children missing; after they were out of London traffic and Frank was pushing the police-issued vehicle as fast as he legally could along the shortest route north, Inspector Lamb rubbed his eyes like a man with a headache. “Let’s hope we get there before worse happens, or the Milltown police take action in time, but I’m not easy in my mind on that score, at all. It’s no fun, trailing after a perpetrator and cleaning up after him.”

“I don’t think we could have acted any faster,” said Frank consolingly. “If Miss Silver hadn’t persuaded Lady Auldmon to go against her husband, I’d be rolling along here all alone, still puzzling at loose threads, with no idea of what I was driving into.”

“It’s true enough we can’t make people say what they know before they’re ready to say it. It’s a great trial in a policeman’s life, but you can’t blame the woman too much, given what her husband’s like. I tell you what, my girls are some years from having to worry about it, thank God, but when the time comes I am telling them, Whatever else you look for in a husband, be sure he’s honest! You show me a married criminal, and I’ll show you a man with a wife either as wicked as he is, or ground down to a nub and not able to call her soul her own.”

“Or vice versa, I suppose,” said Frank. “In the case of a woman criminal, I mean.”

“There’s not so many of those as you need to worry your head about them,” said Inspector Lamb. “I don’t say it never happens, mind, but nine times out of ten, if a woman’s a criminal, there’s a man behind the crime.”

“You think Lucrezia Borgia was largely a victim of her husband and brothers, then?” Frank shifted gears to pass a moving van.

“I’m not familiar with that case. What kind of name is Borgia? Sounds foreign.”

“Italian,” said Frank. “Quite a celebrated case, in its time.”

“Ah. That explains it. It won’t pay you to go studying too far afield, my boy. It’s English law, and English crime, and English criminals you’ll be dealing with, and what they do on the Continent is no business of ours.”

The moving van safely passed, Frank opened the throttle as wide as he dared. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll remember that.”

--
Janey had used up all her courage letting them in, and it took a good bit of coaxing from Crowley (who was no novice at dealing with distraught clients, often ones for whom he had a good deal less sympathy than he had for this one), and a cup of tea made on the spirit lamp exactly as she liked it from Aziraphale, to get the story out of her. Mickey prowled the room, scowling, while Uriel took up station at the window, looking down at the cars. “What we can’t eat from the trays the servants send for him, we get rid of in the bathroom,” Janey said. “Such a waste of food, and medicine, and I know Old Mr Nutter in the village would benefit if we could give it to him instead of the stuff that daughter-in-law of his makes for him. And we make such a palaver about shift changes! We have to be convincing and I never get a holiday and the servants feel sorry for us. I’m hardly ever able to get out in daylight, because of course Ruth has to do so many things, and Mother Ann says she can’t sleep at night, but if you ask me she doesn’t want to be shut up in here all day long, doing crossword puzzles and knitting till it’d be a relief to run about the house screaming!”

“Why haven’t you, you miserable dreep?” Mickey snapped. “You could have told us what was going on at any time!”

Janey shook her head and looked ready to cry again, dabbing ineffectually at her nose with a handkerchief. “Oh, no, no,” she said, “a wife can’t testify against her husband and, and there’s no money and we’d all be ruined and and the boys - at least, Michael’s of age now but he wasn’t before - But Sandy still -“

“S’all right, we won’t let Sandy keep them away from you anymore,” said Crowley, privately reviewing all the honest and patient legal advocates he knew in his head. He wanted to tell her he’d see to the dissolution of her husband’s power over her personally, but in the wake of that parcel he’d sent from Luton the odds were fair he would be unable to help any clients in the near future. Janey would absolutely be the worst kind of client, too, indecisive and never quite coherent, not someone to hand over to just anybody.

“This family is beyond belief,” said Uriel, in a cool, composed, distant voice, staring down at the drive. “Everything about it is horrible. How could they imagine they could get away with this? How long did they intend to keep it up? It makes no sense!”

“It doesn’t have to,” said Angel, fiddling with the brush on the dresser. He hadn’t even cried when he realized that his father was dead; the shocks were falling too thick and too fast, apparently, for him to feel them anymore. No doubt the reckoning would come. “Gabriel has an idea, Sandy backs him up, between them they bully everyone else into giving him his way. No doubt he had, or thought he had, some sort of plan, in the beginning, but reality didn’t shape itself satisfactorily and the plan got extended and tweaked and morphed by such gradual degrees that nobody realized when they crossed the line into complete absurdity.”

“Why the devil did Ruth go along with this?” Mickey poked among the array of medicine bottles on the nightstand, which was positioned to be just glimpsable through the door and to block the view of the bed, should anyone happen to be passing when any of the conspirators slipped in and out. “It’s not like her.”

“She’s never been quite herself since Raffles died,” observed Aziraphale, setting the brush down on top of a pile of crossword puzzle books and picking up a pencil to flip between his fingers in one of his sleight-of-hand exercises. “She was probably afraid of losing access to her children, as Janey has to hers. And on top of that, Gabriel’s got her all mixed up and not trusting herself. You know what he’s like.”

“No, I don’t! You complain about him, and Sandy kowtows to him, but he only needs to be stood up to and he folds!”

“He folds for you,” said Angel, out of the depths of a scrunched up face full of unpleasant thought. Crowley wished Janey would let go of his hand so he could go rub his thumbs over the creases in the beloved forehead. Angel dropped the pencil on the nightstand and started rearranging bottles. He was a slower and more fretful, but also more thorough, thinker than Crowley; he would reach the point Crowley had leaped to, and it would be more than certainty, it would be knowledge, and it would be understanding, and he would state the problem, and they would work it out and not skip any details and no one would get hurt, more than they already were. (The reckoning, when it came, would be devastating.) “You’re his sister. His twin. The only one of us he actually likes.”

“Rubbish! He loves you! He’s no good at showing it, that’s all.”

“I didn’t say love, I said like. He holds me in benign contempt at best, but he likes you and wants to keep your good opinion. He used to bow to Pater’s authority, and he’ll always bully the rest of us until we walk away or give in, but you can stand up to him and win - if he doesn’t have Pater on his side.”

“Then why has he been cheating me for five years? Five years, Sunshine! I could have had my factories turning a profit by now! We could have had the funeral and the arguments and the mourning and and and -“

“And I would have my book and the Lamb wouldn’t have forced his way in here and Bolt and Sandy wouldn’t have killed him to keep him from telling us that Pater is dead and not backing him up,” said Aziraphale.

“What!? No! Bolt didn’t kill anybody!” 

Angel continued as if she hadn’t spoken, “but it’s no use thinking about that wonderful world that we don’t live in, because we live in the world where the Lamb is dead, and the people who killed him know we came here and we need to go, now. We should make as much noise about it as we can. The more the servants know, the better. Everyone needs to know. It’s the only safe thing.” He stopped in front of the little armchair where Janey crouched, clutching Crowley’s hand and wiping her face. “Janey. Janey, dear, we’re leaving. You need to come with us.”

“But I can’t, I can’t testify -“ Janey was about to go off again.

“Yes, you can,” said Crowley, in his best satiny-smooth voice of persuasion. “Not against Sandy, no, nobody’d ask you to do that! Against Gabe, and Dr Fell.” 

“I can’t” - she blinked, transfixed by what was obviously a new idea. “Can I?”

“Of course you can. Why not? You’re not married to either of ‘em. Ruth can testify against Sandy. You know she will.”

“Oh. Oh, she will! She’s as sick of this as I am!” 

“Ruth!” Aziraphale’s eyes went wide. “And the children - are they all up in the nursery?”

“We’d better hurry,” said Uriel. “I think Dr Fell’s letting the air out of your tyres.”

“He’s what!?” Crowley abandoned Janey to hurry to the window, where sure enough the old man was bent over fiddling with the Bentley. He had half a mind to yank open the window, climb out, and drop off the pediment, but the ground floor had high ceilings and he’d be little use with a broken leg. Instead he hurled himself toward the door, twisted the key, and practically fell out on top of Mrs Dr Fell. 

“I can’t let you go anywhere,” she said, even as Crowley pushed past her - she was old and wiry, but he was comparatively young and wiry, so it was no contest, even not wanting to hurt her.  “Not till Ruth and the children get here.”

“Where’s Ruth?” Aziraphale demanded.

“Gabriel’s car is coming up the drive,” called Uriel helpfully.

They needed the cars - at least one of them - and if they could only take one the Bentley was roomier than the Lagonda. Feet thundered down the stairs behind Crowley as he descended two at a time, heard Mrs Dr Fell calling: “Bolt and Sandy will explain everything. It all had to be done. You’ll see! You can bring Ruth back and everything can still be all right!” 

“No it can’t!” Aziraphale roared. Crowley’d never heard him roar before. “Josh is dead! Can’t you get it into your head? Our Lamb is dead and nothing is all right!”

Crowley’s city shoes skidded on the tiles of the front hall, so that he almost hurtled face-first into the door. He pushed through, jumped off the side of the steps, shoved Dr Fell away from his car, and slammed the valve cap back on - but the tyre was already soft, a back tyre was hissing too, and the dark blue saloon car was pulling up in front of the Lagonda, where Uriel had sprinted past her elders and was pulling open the driver’s side door. Sandy spilled out of the passenger side of the saloon car, dragged her away from the Lagonda, and put a revolver in her face. “Everybody calm down,” he said, in his flat emotionless solicitor voice. “Right now.”

Uriel’s eyes went wide and round, a gray cast flooded her warm brown cheeks, and she froze. So did Crowley. So did Mickey, Angel, and Janey, on the front steps, and Mrs Dr Fell in the doorway. The thin November rain fell cold and dismal on all of them. Where the devil were the servants? Not even Sandy would shoot a girl in front of the servants! The engine of the saloon car stopped.

“Don’t play silly buggers, Sandy,” said Mickey. “You won’t shoot anybody.”

Gabe got out of the saloon. Sandy cocked the revolver with an easy, practiced motion. “Why not? I was a soldier. Part of me never stopped being a soldier. If somebody’s my enemy, I can shoot them.”

“Uriel’s not your enemy.”

Crowley’s heart lurched in terror. Don’t say she’s your daughter don’t say she’s your daughter that’s a handle, he’ll know there’s nothing you won’t do, don’t say it don’t say it -

She didn’t say it. She spoke smoothly, evenly, taking a smooth even step down. “Nobody here is your enemy. Everything’s gotten bizarre and melodramatic and we need to step back from that. We’re a family. We’re all on the same side. And the servants will have a field day with this. It’ll be all over the village by nightfall if we don’t restore sanity, so put the gun away.”

“Jane let them into the room. They probably know everything she does by now,” said Dr Fell, walking around the cars. “The servants are all down in the servant’s hall. Ann told them to go there and not stir out of it until we rang for someone.”

Gabe grinned at him, and clapped him on the back, a big meaty hand on the bowed shoulder. Crowley had never wanted to take a tyre iron to his teeth more, and that was saying something. “Good show, Uncle Matt! And good thinking about the tyres. Let’s all go inside and have a chat, okay? Okay!” He looked up, assessing the faces arrayed against him. “The study’d be too crowded, not enough chairs in the billiard room, the library might make somebody a little too emotional - Aunt Ann, lead them to the drawing room, all right? Plenty of space and we can all be comfortable. Is there a fire in there? Great!” He moved past Dr Fell, past Sandy, putting himself between Crowley and the hostage situation, looking at Uriel with that appalling smile fixed on his face. “Miss Ligur, Sandy doesn’t want to hurt you but on the other hand he doesn’t particularly not want to hurt you, either, so you just be quiet like a mouse and not make any sudden moves and as long as everybody else is squeamish about seeing your pretty little head blown off everything’ll be fine. Crawly, you’re with me.” He reached out.

Crowley dodged him and gave him a Prince sneer, matching his pace to Uriel and Sandy. “No I’m not, Gabe,” he said.  “I’m really, really not.” His role here was distraction. Angel and Mickey knew Gabe best. One of them would think of something and he had to be ready to create their opportunity and back them up when they took it. He wondered if he had the guts, if the moment came, to get between Uriel and the gun. On the whole, he thought not. But nobody ever really knew what they would do, until they did it, so there was a chance he might. He’d much rather not find out.

Back into the Abbey they went, Mickey and Aziraphale practically walking backward to keep their eyes on Uriel and Sandy, Janey sobbing again (which was beginning to get on Crowley’s nerves), Gabe bringing up the rear and pulling the door shut behind them. The light of the chandelier high above their heads cast fringes of pale shadows around them all as they walked beneath, following Mrs Dr Fell’s stiff stride to the drawing room, where she turned on the electric lamps in competition with the dull November light coming through the windows. The fire had been going for some time and settled down to a good warmth-giving glow. She put another log on with great care and concentration, as if the entire situation hinged on her positioning it exactly right. 

“Okay,” said Gabe, in the hearty, cheerful voice of someone welcoming his family into his home. “Uncle Matt, you and Aunt Ann can have your usual places nearest the fire, and Mickey and Sunshine can share the sofa. No, no, Crawly, I know you want to be with Sunshine but I think this chair right here’s a better place for you, okay? That’s good. Janey, you take the ottoman - yeah, right there, so if Sunshine or Mickey tries to stand up they’ll trip on you, excellent. Sandy, let me take your hat here, but I think you’d better keep the coat on. Why don’t you take Miss Ligur over by the hearth, too, so she doesn’t get cold? It was very unwise of her to run outside without a coat. Off to the side, there, where if you have to shoot her you won’t get blood on anybody else. Yeah, that's perfect - I always hated that picture. If it gets spoiled I won't mind.” He closed the door behind him, locked it, pocketed the key in his jacket, and draped his own overcoat over an occasional table, with the hats on top of it. “Right! Now we’re all settled and we can have ourselves a good little talk! First thing’s first. Sunshine, what the h-e-double toothpicks did you do with Ruth and the children?”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve asking me anything at gunpoint!” Aziraphale’s eyes darted toward  Sandy and Uriel, and he took himself and his indignation and fear in hand. “I haven’t even seen the children since Fiver’s birthday.”

“Then where are they?”

“If Ruth’s got any sense she’s in the servant’s hall telephoning the police right now,” said Crowley, perched on the edge of his chair with a prickly feeling in his gut and the tremor starting in his hands. Where was Ruth? It wasn’t like her to leave Janey in the lurch, but things had gone pear-shaped rather quickly.

“Don’t play innocent,” said Gabe. “I sent them all up here yesterday afternoon for safekeeping, and they never arrived. None of her friends have seen her, so I know that’s down to one of you. I’ve reported them missing, and when we find out where you stashed them don’t think I won’t bring you up for kidnaping and don’t think we can’t make it stick.”

The prickly sensation turned to soaring. “God and Satan both!” Crowley cackled. “She’s done a runner! Took the kids and took off! Good for her!”

“She wouldn’t do that,” said Mrs Dr Fell, hugging her arms and shivering in front of the fire. “She’d never do that. She wouldn’t desert me. Even during the War, she wrote to me every chance she got. When she lived in Lancaster, she’d call me every Sunday. And the little ones write to their old nan regular, send me pictures and all. If you don’t know where she is - and he doesn’t know where she is -“ Her entire manner changed as she turned to her husband. “Why are we sitting here, arguing over, over nothing? Something dreadful must have happened to her!”

“Be quiet, woman! We’ve bigger fish to fry here!”

“Something dreadful’s been happening to her every day of her life since Pater died,” said Angel, hair studded with fading seed pearls of rain, eyes on Gabe’s smiling face. “Please don’t worry, Aunt Ann. I expect she knows what she’s doing. Knows what she needs to do, and has made sure that the children will be safe while she does it.”

“It’s time to cut your losses, Gabe,” said Crowley, hands on his knees to still the trembling, wanting a cigarette. “In fact, it was time to cut them when Joshua got into that empty sickroom. You should have known she wouldn’t stand for that.”

Gabe made an insincere grimace of confusion. “Stand for what? Ruth doesn’t want her parents and her brother and her husband going to gaol. She doesn’t want to go to gaol, herself - who’d look after the children?” 

“They think you and Sandy killed the Lamb,” said Mickey. “Explain to them that you didn’t. But make Sandy take the gun away from Uriel’s head, first - it’s distracting and will make the explanation less convincing.”

Uriel bit her lip, eyes flicking from the gun to her mother to her captor and back to the gun, braced to move.

“The Lamb made himself into a boche, Mickey,” said Sandy, as if he were explaining a point of law to a client. He wore a brand new coat, and brand new gloves, and his old impassive face. “We gave him every chance. Gave him a lift, tried to talk him down all the way to London. But he wouldn’t see reason. He didn’t give us a choice. Even knowing that Bolt’s Lord Auldmon now, he was about to betray us. ”

Janey bent over her knees on the ottoman, her shoulders shaking. Aziraphale laid a hand on her back, but the eyes darting around the room were Captain Fell’s. Crowley didn’t know whether that was a good sign, or not.

“Betray you?” Mickey hadn’t sounded like that since the trip through the Pyrenees. Crowley wanted to squirm, but managed not to. If she broke, Uriel would break, and disaster would be unavoidable. “You mean, by telling me that you’re cheating me out of my rights? Betray you, to me, is that what you’re saying?”

“Now, Mickey,” said Gabe in his most irritating soothing tone. “Nobody’s cheating you. As soon as we get the financial situation sorted out, Uncle Matt will pronounce the Old Man dead, we’ll slip a couple of favors to the undertaker, and everybody’ll get their shares. But we knew you’d get like this, so we just asked Josh to wait a little while. I’m on track to get everything squared away by the end of the year so we don’t need the extra income anymore.”

“No, you’re not,” retorted Mickey. “It will never be squared away, you dolt of a Bolt! Let me guess, you’ve been promising everybody you were right on the edge of having enough to end the charade every few months since it started, haven’t you? But it won’t, because it can’t, because every time the market fails you, which it always does these days and you’re always surprised, you’re just that little bit more in the hole, aren’t you? You got five thousand pounds this summer! How deep is that hole now, that five thousand pounds wouldn’t get you out of it?”

Gabe made a dismissive gesture. “I split it up among investments. I only need three of them to pay off. Two have and two haven’t and the last one’s sure to come in now, and that’ll be the last little bit and then everything will be fine.”

“Everything would already be fine if you’d let Pater be dead five years ago!”

“No, it wouldn’t! The death duties and the loss of income -“

“I could have had those factories turning a consistent profit by now. You don’t think I’d put some of it into the Estate if you asked? Make Sandy put the gun down and we’ll talk about how to turn things around.”

Gabe’s grin turned sour.  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. This is exactly what Pater and I have been trying to protect you from! If we’d let you be manager you’d know how bad it is and you’d be singing a different tune right now.”

Mickey opened her mouth to say something that would send the whole situation to blazes, and Crowley stuck his oar in before she could. “Yeah, none of that sibling rivalry business matters right now,” he said. He really needed a smoke, but if he reached for his case Sandy might object and the nearest source was a humidor over by Mickey, next to the big silver photograph album. “What matters right now is that you’re in an untenable situation, Gabe. You can’t keep the secret anymore. It’s out.”

“Only to the people in this room,” said Gabe. “If you’d all just see reason -“

“Nobody can see reason when there’s a gun in the case,” said Aziraphale, kneading Janey’s neck with his thumbs. “It’s counterproductive. If Uriel’s shot, if anybody is shot, in your drawing room, then you’ve lost all your leverage on the rest of us and, what’s the phrase? The entire gaffe is blown. You won’t be able to cover it up anymore. So if you really want reasonableness to have any chance to exist here, in this room, you need to tell Sandy to stand down.”

Gabe started shaking his head before Aziraphale was half done. “No, if you make him shoot Uriel we’ll just have to spin a different story.”

“If Uriel gets shot I will personally tear you both to pieces!” Mickey shouted, at the same time that Aziraphale protested: “Story!?” and Crowley yelped: “Make him?”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” said Gabe. “You can get another secretary. You and Crawly and Sunshine can swear yourselves blue about what happened, but we outnumber you. It’d just be a matter of who to cut loose. I vote Crawly myself, but it can be you or Sunshine if neither of you come to your senses.” His grimace was a rank caricature of a pleading face. “Don’t put me in a position that I have to lose you, Mickey!”

“You obviously don’t understand how stories work, brother dear,” said Angel, the only human being on earth who could say brother dear in this situation and not sound mocking. “Your problem here is, that you have cast yourself and Sandy in the villainous roles. The only way to cease being a villain is to stop doing villainous things. You can let Uriel go, face up to what you’ve done, and decide whether to accept the legal consequences, or flee without doing more damage. Every other choice leads to disaster.”

“Yeah, that’s rubbish,” said Gabe. “I’m trying to save the family, here, and all I’m getting for it is grief.”

“Killing your baby brother is a strange way to save the family,” said Crowley, anxious to get Gabe’s attention off of Aziraphale; and succeeding distressingly well, for Gabe turned on him, looming like an iceberg bearing down on a ship.

“Joshua wasn’t my brother! He was nothing but the whelp of that, that Woman the Old Man brought in to replace Mother. He didn’t even look like any of us, for Pete’s sake! And I didn’t kill him! By the time we got to London we’d talked each other to a standstill. He wouldn’t budge, so Sandy gave me the high sign and asked me to go by Westminster Bridge so we could watch the official firework display. Which made Josh think he’d won. I was as surprised as he was when Sandy shot him during the big finale and shoved him over the side. But once it was done I could see it was the only way.”

Aha! Crowley carefully kept his voice easy and drawling, as his soul pounced on this crack in the team. “Hear that, Sandy? Gabe’s willing to give you up to the hangman, put the whole thing on you.”

“There’s no hangman here but me,” said Sandy. “Gabriel’s the principle. I did it for him. And dropping the motorbike off at the bookshop to divert the law onto Sunshine was his idea. He won’t deny that.” If his arm was getting tired, holding the gun steady, he showed no sign of it.

“Of course not. It was a perfectly good idea.” Gabe relaxed again. “Sandy needed a new revolver anyway. He dropped his when he shoved the body over. We weren’t expecting him to be found so soon, and making it look like the Lamb’d gotten to the bookshop and that Sunshine’s gun was stolen would have given the police a good place to poke around when Sunshine reported him missing.”

“So you killed one little brother and framed the other?” Mickey’s voice cracked.

Gabe chuckled a horrible dry chuckle. “Mickey, c’mon, you know he wasn’t our brother! And it wasn’t a frame, just a couple of hints. It’s not like Sunshine’d hang, whatever we did. Crawly wouldn’t let him - he’d confess to high treason, let alone murder, if it’d keep his angel out of trouble.  And it should have been any number of days, if ever, before the Lamb bobbed up again in the river.  Everything’s happened too fast here, one bit of bad luck after another.”

“Bad luck,” said Angel. “You get so much of that. Nothing to do with your choices at all.”

“Oh, yes, it’s always been so damned easy for you, hasn’t it?” Gabe rounded on Angel with the most vicious-looking grimace yet. “Sunshine and the Lamb, the whore’s sons, so blasted adorable, can’t make them sad, can’t disappoint them! Can’t cane Sunshine when he deserves it - he’ll blow chunks all over you! Can’t keep thrashing the Lamb till he gives in, no, he never gives in, got to stop before you kill him! Like he’d be a loss! No boring estate management, economics, or factories for them, oh no! They get London! They get whatever they feel like studying!” He started to pace, gesticulating. “And they throw it his teeth and what does Pater do? Shrugs and lets them go!”

“That’s not how -“ Angel started; but Crowley motioned him to stop, and he stopped. 

Gabe kept on as if he didn’t hear; probably he didn’t. “Sunshine wants a bookshop, some old bookseller he’s been sucking up to drops dead and leaves him enough books to stock a bookshop! Lamb wants to travel, his granddad pops his clogs and he’s got income to travel on. They’re supposed to marry money into the family, and they could, damn it, women talking about the curls and how sweet they are, I’m laying myself out dressing to the nines with a title going begging and getting snubbed all over England and have to settle for Ruth who’s cold as a fish! Sunshine’s a sodding ponce and Lamb’s a vagrant poser in a beard but they could get the rich girls, that’s one thing they could do for the family all right, but do they? Do they hell! Sunshine drops an, an embarrassment bomb all over the dinner table and gets to run off to play the woman for his little pervert buddy and Joshua bangs around Europe doing God knows what with whom and when he finally decides to bring a girl home what does he bring? A Yid actress with nothing! No name, no cash, nothing! And he has the gall to break into Pater’s sickroom because he’s mad about that stupid, stupid book? That nobody can read! That nobody ever thought twice about till that woman came into the house and thought it was pretty! And it’s all about how Sunshine’s angel is funny and clever and sweet but my angel, the real angel that’s actually in the goddamn Bible, the big boss angel is the stupid puffed up butt of the joke! Nobody else got promised anything, not one of us, I’m the heir and all I’m promised is responsibilities and headaches and ledgers and all I get is grumbling, but you get this stupid, stupid book even though you were too lazy to do the bare minimum the Old Man asked you to do to deserve it!”  He practically tripped over Janey, who squeaked and fell off the ottoman, to do his iceberg loom over Angel.

“Now, Bolt,” said Aziraphale, raising his hands and opening his arms slowly and gently.  “This agitation is not good for you. Ruth’s told me how worried she is about your blood pressure, and now I see where it comes from. Neither the Lamb nor I ever dreamed that the way we lived our lives was making your life harder, and I’m sure I speak for him when I say that we never intended anything of the sort and deeply regret it. Come here, you poor thing -“

 Gabe snarled and pulled away from the embrace, yanking his jacket out of Angel’s hands. “Get away from me, you ungrateful bugger! I work my fingers to the bone for this family, I do whatever I’m asked to do, everything I need to do to keep it all together, and what do I get? I get a ton of debts and my own sister nagging at me that I’m doing it wrong and now I’m supposed to stand here and be told I’m the bad guy and I need to turn myself in or run away? The hell with that!”  He stood over Angel, trembling.

Janey, also trembling, crept (literally; she didn’t dare stand apparently) to Crowley’s chair. Almost all eyes were on Gabe, even Sandy’s; only Crowley looked over the whole scene, while Uriel retained her focus on the gun. The damn gun. He thought of several things to say and didn’t say them. He didn’t think his voice would make an impression just now.

Mickey was green about the gills, but her voice was sisterly and as kind, perhaps, as Mickey’s voice was capable of getting. “I know, Bolt, they’re annoying, but none of that is a reason to hold Uriel at gunpoint.”

Gabe sighed, clearly disappointed in her. “Will you stop harping on that? If nobody does anything stupid she’ll be fine, and Sunshine’ll do something stupid for sure if there’s no hostage.”

Crowley cleared his throat, preparatory to doing something stupid; but the moment of transition would be an opportunity and they needed one. “Change hostages, then. Mickey’s got no stake in whether I live or die and she’ll be a lot more, um,” he couldn’t bring himself to say reasonable, “ready to listen to you if I’m the one at risk.”

Angel’s face said no even louder than he did, Janey made a series of small gaspy sounds, Sandy looked pleased (what the devil had he ever done to Sandy? Since he left school?), and Gabe shook his head. “No, only Uriel will do. We can’t shoot the best available fall guy.”

“It’s true. Never point a gun if you’re not willing to kill whoever’s in its path,” sighed Sandy. “Thanks for the offer, though. I’ll hold a gun to your head any time you like that we don’t have a use for you.”

“Then I’ll do it,” said Janey, standing up, small and mousy and rumpled, eyes bright with defiance and terror. “She’s barely more than a child and she’s got nothing to do with any of this and I’d, I’d just as soon be shot as be married to a murderer and don’t think I don’t know what you’ll put me through for opening the sickroom door when this is all over, however it ends.”

Sandy rolled his eyes. “Sit down, Jane.”

Gabe snorted. “I’d tell you not to be stupid but that’s past hope. You’d make a lousy hostage. Nobody here cares if you die.”

“That is not true,” snapped Angel. “It’s a very brave offer, my dear, but it won’t do. We can’t possibly be expected to negotiate in the shadow of a gun, whoever it’s pointed at, as I think has been amply demonstrated. What exactly do you hope to accomplish here, Bolt? What exactly is it that you want from us, in return for setting Uriel at liberty?”

“Obviously, I want all of you to keep mum about the Old Man dying,” said Gabe, as if repeating something for the fifth time. “Just for a little while longer. Just till the final investment pays off at the end of the quarter.”

“Very well,” said Aziraphale. “What, after all, is a couple of months all in the family?”

“Sure,” said Mickey, a bit too quickly. “I can live with that.”

“And you won’t kick up any more fuss about the book.”

“Oh, no, no, I never intended to! Just give Crowley the name of the solicitor who conducted the transaction and he’ll make the arrangements for me discreetly. After the end of the year, even, if you like.” Aziraphale did a reasonable impression of his apologetic, eager-to-accommodate smile. It looked odd, with Captain Fell’s calculating eyes.

Gabe’s face spread into a grin. “See? Was that so hard?”

Crowley started to relax, and Uriel to look hopeful, but Dr Fell’s voice cracked like a whip. “It won’t do,” he said. “Not with Ruth out of control.”

“Oh, right, that’s the other thing. Where’d you put Ruth?” Gabe reconfigured the grin into a glare and directed it down his nose at Angel. “And don’t lie to me. She wouldn’t have run off on her own. She hasn’t got the nerve. Somebody helped her.”

Angel’s blank frustration showed clearly on his face. Probably he was smelling trench mud. Time to take the direct pressure back off of him, before the lice started creeping. “Fine,” Crowley spat out the words, “what price attorney-client privilege under the circumstances? I gave her a telephone number awhile back, put together a little escape package for her. Money, clothes, new names for her and the children, and a contact on the Continent to help her find her feet over there. I didn’t think she’d ever use them but I was glad to give her the chance. You lot make her miserable, you know. She’ll be across the Channel and well away by now. I promise you, running to spill the beans is the last thing on her mind.” It was the best kind of lie, easy to remember and based on truth - he would have given Ruth, or Janey, a way out any time they’d thought to ask, any time since he’d developed his system for disappearing people who needed to disappear. He wished now that he’d offered. Gabe’s scheme wouldn’t have worked for a day, if the women had possessed any good options.

“And your promises are worth so much, I’m sure,” said Dr Fell.  “We can’t rely on that. Even if he’s telling the truth -“

“He’s not,” declared Mrs Dr Fell stoutly, glaring at Crowley as savagely as Gabe ever could. “Ruth wouldn’t do that to me. But she didn’t run to the police, she wouldn’t do that, either! I’m telling you, something dreadful’s happened to her.”

“- she knows enough to put the law in our laps, and we can’t afford to assume she won’t do so,” Dr Fell finished, talking over his wife. “The question is, what does she know about the Lamb’s death?”

“Nothing!” Gabe dismissed that consideration with a wave of his hand.

“Not quite nothing,” said Sandy. “She saw us arrive at Mickey’s house.”

“That’s nothing! She never knows what time it is since I smashed that ugly nursing watch for her, and you know how confused she gets.”

“Hmm. Yes.” Dr Fell rubbed his chin. “If she doesn’t know anything directly about the Lamb, the worst she can do is tell the police that Michael’s dead, which they are bound to construe as a motive.”

Because it is the motive, Crowley thought, observing the same thought on Angel’s face, and wondering briefly how it felt to live inside of Dr Fell’s head. He ground his palms into his knees to still the shaking, but it had worked its way up to his elbows now.

“Also, now that Jane’s proved herself unreliable, we have far too many people in on that secret who cannot be trusted to put the family interests first in the case of a police investigation, without a powerful secondary reason to be quiet, such as a revolver beside Miss Ligur’s ear, which is an untenable long-term situation.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, if Ruth tells them Pater’s dead, it doesn’t matter how many of us swear he isn’t under what kind of duress,” Mickey burst out. “They’ll insist on seeing him personally and you can’t show him to them alive! That’s why Sunshine suggested you flee or confess! Let Uriel go now, and we’ll all help you get away! Won’t we?”

Even Uriel ventured to nod. “Of course we will,” said Crowley. “America’s a better place for you two than the Continent, but fortunately I’ve got contacts there, too. Can’t be your old stomping grounds, I’m afraid, but -“

“I’m not running away.” Gabe folded his arms. This entire family was so pigheaded, Crowley could scream! And was very much afraid that Uriel would do so, if this kept up much longer.  “I’ve only done what I had to do and that doesn’t make me a villain. Uncle Matt! Nobody at Scotland Yard’s ever met you! You could pretend to be him! Powder you up some, make you look pale, put a little quaver in your voice -”

“Hmm.” Dr Fell looked thoughtful. “Yes, that could do, if Ann told them I had been called away on an emergency. Ruth would know better, but with the entire remainder of the family swearing against her, and her tendency to agitation in the face of opposition, we could easily persuade them that she suffers from delusional tendencies and only a carefully maintained home prevents the need to put her into an institution.  But we’ll still need a hostage to guarantee that the entire family does so swear.”

“My Ruth does not belong in an institution!”

“Uriel cannot possibly stay here and be your hostage!”

Both mothers protested at the same moment; only Mickey was heeded. “I agree,” said Dr Fell. “I suggest that, due to the mysterious absence of Ruth, we no longer have the collective strength available to turn Michael over frequently enough to prevent bedsores, when Bolt and Sandy need to be away. Therefore, Sunshine - who, though he lacks nursing training is a quick study - will stay here in attendance, shutting up the bookshop indefinitely and leaving the management of the properties to Crowley and his accountant. This will implicate him in our little“ - (a pause, during which he visibly searched his head for a suitably neutral term, and Crowley could hear the guns now) “ our little domestic charade. And, of course, if he or Crowley or Mickey cut up rough, I am as capable of putting a bullet in his brain as Sandy is -”

“Oi!” Crowley protested. “Hippocratic Oath!” And anyway, he isn’t, and it doesn’t matter what they ask, we just say yes and get the gun out of the equation and then - then we think of something but Angel is not staying here while we leave, that is not happening.

Dr Fell continued without missing a beat, “- though it would be regrettable, since he actually is Michael’s son. I doubt I would need to. If I needed to, though, because someone decided that it would be preferable for my son to hang and the Estate be left destitute than to simply be patient, we would want to have a suicide note in hand, in which he confesses that he became aware after the fact that Crowley killed the Lamb because - oh, we can think of some motive, I’m sure, if we put our heads together - and attempted to protect him due to their unnatural attachment, but ultimately couldn’t live with himself.” He finished up and looked around at the assembled staring faces, as the guns became louder in the background.

 “Yeah, that sounds good,” said Gabe. “Sunshine, write us the letter, just for insurance, you know, and give it to Uncle Matt, and then Sandy will finally be able to put the gun down.”

Dr Fell nodded. “Indeed, yes. Jane, I think we could all use some tea.”

The artillery started thumping. Janey swallowed, presumably to get all the reasons this plan could not possibly work out of her throat, stood on legs that shook like Crowley’s hands, and said, “Shouldn’t I, shouldn’t I get the door, first? Since the servants are forbidden to leave the hall?”

Chapter Text

From this mountain they saw all the kingdoms of the world, with their mighty cities and their green fields, their busy ports and their quiet gardens, the kings upon their thrones toying with the lives of men and the children of the poor playing in the dust. Jesus saw them, and his heart was moved with love. Then said the Serpent: “I lived in Heaven once, and I have lived in Hell, and then I was sent to abide and to labor on this Earth, in the midst of humanity, and I am here to tell you: The Earth, in all its toils and travails, is best.”

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

An inspector named Eatough, a sergeant, and two constables, who should have already been on the scene and blamed their superiors that they were not, joined Frank and Lamb in Milltown, and on the road to the Abbey they met  PC Ernie Shadwell mending the tyre on his pushbike, which they’d shoved into the back of the police car despite the mud and the lack of a rug to put down, Frank privately resolving to suggest that rugs in the boot become standard equipment in police vehicles. Eatough and a constable went around to the kitchen garden, to cover the exit there, and the other constable and sergeant to the west wing’s entrance from the rose garden and stables, which PC Shadwell said was never used but through which it should be possible to flee, in theory. This left Lamb, Frank, and PC Shadwell at the front entrance, where Inspector Lamb started off by pulling the doorbell, to no effect, and soon escalated to alternating that with knocking increasingly loudly. The only sign of life in the dreary facade of the Abbey was the light through the transom and in the tall, wide windows of the room above and to the left of the door.

“I can’t credit it,” said PC Shadwell, a younger and more coherent man than Sgt Shadwell, and bearing no close resemblance to him. “His lordship dead and tucked away in the west wing all this time, and us coming around every Christmas to sing under his window and get a bit of wassail. Miss Ruth - her ladyship I mean - would open the window to let in the music, and draw the drapes to keep out the cold, and call down to us that he thanked us and would we please sing ‘Angels We Have Heard on High’ before we went away again. And us never thinking it odd that he didn’t come to the window himself, but only saying what a shame it was that they didn’t get in proper nurses and give those poor women some rest!”

“And now you know why.” Lamb pounded at the door. “If they don’t open in the next thirty seconds I’m opening on my own responsibility, if I have to jimmy the lock or break the door!  Mrs Hostmassif’s Lagonda boxed in, Crowley’s car with the air out of its tires, and this unconscionable wait constitute probable cause. They do still have servants?”

“Not as many as they need, no butler at all anymore, only Mrs Danvers that came from Cheshire and she’s thinks too good for us all, and -“

The door swung open at last, revealing a tall, lighted entrance hall and an angular woman pale as a ghost. “Hush your noise,” she said, in a low raspy voice, “and come in quietly! They sent us to the servant’s hall and told us to stay there, but it’s one thing to be discreet for the sake of the family and another to let myself in for trouble with the police at the kitchen door, and if he’d fire that Mary Hodges that’s related to half the village he’d fire me that’s been told I don’t belong here often enough, so to the devil with ‘em all! There’s voices in the drawing room - that way - but you never heard it from me! Wipe your feet there, Ernie Shadwell!”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Inspector Lamb. “Hush, now, lads, and step as quiet as you can.”

--

Dr Fell said: “Damn! We’ll have to regroup. Sandy, take her -“

“Stay where you are,” Gabe contradicted. Crowley and Aziraphale’s eyes met across the space between and they both stood, Aziraphale touching Mickey’s shoulder. Crowley tried to steer Janey behind the chair, but she clutched his hand.

“We are out of time,” said Dr Fell. “Sandy -“

Angel stepped between Mickey and Gabe, who had turned away from them both, and tossed the key he’d taken from Gabe’s jacket pocket behind his back.  The guns rumbled.

“No, Sandy!” Gabe contradicted his uncle. “We only have to keep our heads. An Englishman’s home is his castle, you know.”

Crowley snatched the key out of the air and passed it to Janey, pushing her toward the door. Angel took another step. Mickey stood, eyes on her daughter, hand groping out toward the occasional table nearest her.

Sandy  had lost his focus on Uriel, looking from his father to his cousin. “Make up your minds! Even I can’t stand here like this forever and if that’s policemen, I’m the one pointing a gun at a girl!”

“It’s fine!” Gabe said heartily. “I’ll go out there and buy us some time. Aziraphale, sit down! Why aren’t you writing?”

The guns stopped.

“You didn’t bring me pen and paper,” said Angel primly, taking another step. “I’m just going to get some.”

“No you’re not!” Sandy’s solictor’s face broke out an expression at last, more impatience than rage, as he swung the gun around. Crowley lunged at Gabe, pushing him between the gun and Aziraphale at the same time that Aziraphale upended the ottoman into his brother’s path. Uriel, screaming like a teakettle, dove behind Mrs Dr Fell. Mickey charged Sandalphon wielding the silver photograph album. Studio portraits exploded across the hearth as it connected to his head. The gun went off.

Cordite. Blood. Petrol. Mud. Gabe dragging Crowley down with him, Aziraphale still moving, Dr Fell shouting: “You idiot!,” Uriel screaming and screaming and screaming, lurching away from the fireplace all tangled up with Mickey. Crowley stepped on Gabe’s hand and chest in order to vault over the ottoman. Aziraphale slammed Sandy up against the picture Gabe didn’t like, seizing and twisting the hand with the gun. Sandy roared in fury and the gun fired into the ceiling before it dropped amid a shower of plaster. Crowley scrambled for it, opening the cylinder, dropping the remaining bullets out as Sandy punched Aziraphale in the belly, over and over again, with the inevitable result hindering Aziraphale from taking control of that hand, too; then Gabe’s fist slammed into Crowley’s kidney which hurt like blazes and somebody shouted but Crowley’s ears were still ringing so he had no idea who that was, or what they shouted; neither did he care because Sandy had no right to punch Aziraphale and what he got in return served him right. Gabe was heavy on his back and so was his fist. Crowley seized Sandalphon’s ankle with his right hand and began chopping at the back of his knee with his stronger left. One does not make active physical love to someone as powerful as Angel for years on end without building up a certain amount of strength oneself, and if he could get the damn knee to give, overbalancing the bastard was not impossible, with so much photograph paper to slip on - and the guns were so damn loud and the smell of petrol and mud choked him and the light was too bright and Gabe had started choking him and something went crunch somewhere.

From Frank’s point of view, the most striking thing beyond the door that suddenly unlocked itself and swung open before them was the blood. It was all over Mrs Hostmassif and Miss Ligur as they clung to each other, crouching behind a chair, and had spattered across an overturned ottoman as well as the carpet, so toward the blood he went. Plaster dust still rained down as Inspector Lamb waded into the knot of struggling bile-streaked men by the mantel and dragged Gabriel off of Crowley’s back and his hands from around Crowley’s neck, shouting: “What’s all this? Stop at once in the name of the law!”

Sandy tried to throw Aziraphale off. Aziraphale continued to vomit, looking embarrassed and determined and miserable, as he strove to keep Sandalphon safely pinned to the wall. Crowley continued to pound the back of Sandalphon’s knee, which was beginning to buckle. Lamb let go of Gabriel and hauled at Crowley.

“Oh, thank god!” Gabriel brushed off his jacket, and made a face of disgust at what this got on his hand. “Inspector, Crowley shot Mickey! He killed Joshua and -“

“Shut up, Gabriel!”

This was a new voice, from an unexpected quarter: a small drab woman who came out from behind the door shaking all over, fists clenched, a voice that sounded as if it hurt clawing its way out from the depths of her soul. “Shut up shut up shut up! It’s all your fault! You and Sandy killed the Lamb and Dr Fell helped you and Sandy pointed the gun at that poor colored girl to make everybody do what you wanted and now Mickey’s shot and if she dies it’s your fault! It’s! All! Your! Fault! And I’ll testify and you can’t stop me!”  Then she burst into tears.

“Excuse me,” said the old, bald man just standing up from his place near the hearth. “My wife and I have a patient to attend to.”
--

It was a long and trying afternoon.

Mrs Hostmassif had suffered a bullet wound through her arm, which Dr and Nurse Fell patched up before she lost much more blood, with as much professional skill and detachment as if they’d had nothing to do with her acquiring it. She was dazed and in pain, and would not let go of Miss Ligur, who would similarly not let go of her. Other injuries to other parties were superficial, though Crowley was hoarse and moved with care for his back. The fine molded ceiling would never be the same, and those who had been in the tangle by the fireplace were afflicted with a nasty mess and would probably be black and blue soon. Since Inspector Lamb insisted none of them leave the room until he had some grasp of the situation, Mrs Danvers organized the servants to produce sufficient washbasins, painkillers, bandages, and flannels to go around. Aziraphale vomited shamefacedly into one of the basins several times before he was able to stop, and then asked that the kitchen send up tea for everyone and sandwiches for himself and the policemen, if it was not too much trouble. It was not clear to Frank how he’d come to know that the policemen had missed their lunch, but he supposed it was the kind of thing Aziraphale could be counted on to know. The Milltown sergeant had brought a camera and took pictures of the aftermath before a housemaid was allowed to start cleaning up the blood, bile, photographs, and whatnot.

Aziraphale, Crowley, Mrs Hostmassif, Miss Ligur, and the mousy little woman, who turned out to be Jane Fell, all gave statements. So did Ann Fell, once Inspector Lamb assured her that Ruth had, indeed, taken her knowledge to the police, at which point she appeared to collapse in upon herself in a welter of conflicting feelings. Gabriel said he would give a statement, but Sandalphon clamped a hand over his mouth and informed him that, as his solicitor, he insisted that he be quiet for once. “But then they’ll get to tell it all their way,” Lord Auldmon said sulkily into his cousin’s palm.

“If you try, I will punch your teeth in,” said Sandy. “Save it for the barrister.”

“I’ll call my father’s office and warn him that if any of his friends defends you I’m going to tell the newspapers all sorts of things they don’t want the newspapers to know about,” said Jane Fell. “ After you hang and I get out of prison I’m going to live in a cottage and raise poultry and see the boys whenever I want, so there!”

“Oh, Janey, you won’t go to prison! You’re a heroine! Your boys will be bragging about you for years,” Crowley assured her.

“And you shall have all the poultry and any cottage on the grounds you like,” Aziraphale added. “I think I can promise that on Ruth and Fiver’s behalf.”

Janey turned red to the roots of her hair. “I’m not a heroine. All I did was unlock a couple of doors.”

“Never underestimate the importance of unlocking the right door at the right time,” Frank told her. “Are you ready to give a statement now?”

She wiped her eyes and sniffed. “I wish I hadn’t married Sandy before I ever met a man who’d be nice to me!  I had no idea then there was any such a person out there, and now here’s three in one room. But it’s too late now. How does one make a statement? Where do I start?”

With so many statements to take and people to detain, Frank was very glad to have picked up the extra manpower in Milltown, and found himself in the novel position of leading questioning rather than taking down statements, as the local men were not sufficiently up on the case - or cases, rather - to know what to ask. The study and dining room were used for statement taking, while the obvious victims - Miss Ligur and Mrs Hostmassif, who refused to go to the hospital in Milltown for a “flesh wound” - took refuge in the sickroom (already well-stocked with painkillers and sedatives) and those under suspicion of violent crimes were confined in the nursery and schoolroom, with the largest of the constables on watch, and the rest held in relative comfort in the library. PC Shadwell and Jane Fell led Inspectors Lamb and Eatough into the depths of the cellar of the west wing, and there by the light of their electric torches they looked, finally, upon the face of Michael Fell IV, late the Lord of Auldmon Abbey. He had been laid out with his arms crossed upon his chest and pennies on his eyes, covered by a sheet, in an old furniture crate full of rock salt, with the lid laid on but not nailed down. The dry cold that had originally mummified him had not held for all the years he had lain there, and mildew speckled his bald head. Eatough called the police morgue to fetch him in the morning, and to bring photographers and bright lights to do their best at taking pictures of him in his resting place. 

“There’ll have to be an autopsy,” Eatough said, “not that they’d have gone to all this trouble to pretend he was alive, if he’d died any way other than natural. Still it’ll have to be done.” He shook his head. “Poor old bastard. They were a great family, in their way, around these parts. That’s partly why the chief wouldn’t move any faster or spare any more men. It’s a fantastic enough accusation, and we thought we knew them. My folks work in his factories. Worked there myself, before I enlisted. When I was a lad I won a bicycle, one year, in the  raffle at the big Christmas dinner they used to hold. Lord Auldmon gave it to me with his own hands, told me Merry Christmas, and he meant it.” He sighed. “Master Gabriel never meant a Merry Christmas in his life.”

All those who gave statements, plus the household staff (questioned in a general way about the atmosphere and habits of the house by PC Shadwell), confirmed that Sandalphon Fell, like Aziraphale, would have had no difficulty in picking up Joshua’s motorbike from the side of the road and storing it in the back seat of the blue saloon car (with the supercharged engine), and direct observation of the interior of that vehicle confirmed that rugs suitable for protecting upholstery were stored in the boot and that the rear seat had ample room for it, even with Joshua wedged in too. Mrs Danvers and the solitary footman had both, on Monday afternoon, seen Sandalphon hurry out to the stableyard where the motorbike had been parked, and where such oddments as nails, hammers, screwdrivers, and other implements suitable for putting holes in gas tanks could be found. The gun turned over by Crowley, and which all statements agreed was the one with which Miss Ligur had been threatened, had the letters P A X scratched awkwardly on the cylinder, so was clearly the one stolen from the bookshop. In light of the evidence, it seemed to both Frank and the Inspector that they had a tolerably solid case for prosecution, and that the only information lacking - such details as precisely how the victim had been maneuvered into position to be conveniently shot during the climax of the fireworks - would not give the defense much to work with in attempting to create reasonable doubt.

Crowley spent a considerable amount of time and energy arguing that his client Jane Fell was clearly a victim rather than a perpetrator. In the end, the Milltown men arrested Dr and Mrs Metatron Matthew Fell on charges of criminal conspiracy, fraud, and accessory after the fact to willful murder,  and their daughter-in-law Jane as a material witness, to be held separately, while the Scotland Yard men arrested Gabriel and Sandalphon Fell on charges of willful murder, which the Milltown constabulary conceded took precedence over both the fraud and the hostage taking that fell under their jurisdiction. Scotland Yard also considered detaining Anthony J Crowley, as a material witness in a number of crimes on which they had recently received information. Frank felt awkward about this; Inspector Lamb did not appear to. “The source isn’t one I’d normally regard as reliable, and I’m not personally familiar with the cases cited,” he admitted, “but the fact is, you’ve been accused of guilty knowledge of a good many missing persons, and I’m already rounding up so many people, that if you did a flit at this point, I’d have a hard time explaining how I let you get away. I suppose Eatough could take you in for assault on Sandalphon, though it’d never get to court, just to keep you still; but that’d be a Lancashire charge and if we’re going to hang onto you it’s the Yard’s eye that should be on you.”

Crowley looked limp and sinister as he lolled beside (not quite against) Aziraphale, on a loveseat underneath a window in the library. His dark glasses had been smashed in the tussle by the fireplace, and the scarring of his eyes gave him a particularly devilish appearance. His hands were restless and shaky. “Ha! I knew if I told Froggy to run to France and by no means to go near the police he’d head straight to Scotland Yard! Have you called the number on the card I gave him yet?”

“I don’t know when you imagine we’ve had time. He said it was contact information for Miss Ligur’s old nursemaid?”

“A very resourceful and reliable woman,” Aziraphale informed them. He had consumed astonishing amounts of tea and sandwiches and looked exhausted, but still sat very straight, his hands folded in his lap. “Mademoiselle Jeannette Dupont, residing in Calais, where she runs a small pension and maintains an active correspondence with my accountant, Mildred Grimbsy.”

“Prince Boys are raised to value connections,” said Crowley. “By the time Hastur dismissed Jeannette, I’d already had to arrange for one woman with an inconvenient baby to get out of a client’s way, and realized that if I had to do much of that sort of thing, I’d need foreign assistance. Aziraphale, Mildred, and to a certain extent the Erich brothers are a big help with domestic arrangements, but I’ve paid Jeannette to find new lives on the Continent for a half dozen people, and there’s a woman in Boston who’s helped a couple more, largely for the romance of it, and because I gave her a hand with her ambulance once.”

“Hmph! That seems excessive. It’s not as if we’re Hitlerites here.” Lamb seemed offended at the idea of the need for such a service in Britain; Frank wasn’t half convinced of its necessity, himself. 

An edge came into Crowley’s voice. “Britain’s a law-abiding enough place, for the most part, but - not every British law is just, and the most just law in the world can be ignored, or twisted, or bent, or broken, anywhere in the world, if enough money and fear are applied to it. The people I made go away are, mostly, deeply wronged people, whose existence threatened clients with the inconvenient consequences of their own actions, that they were willing to pay handsomely to evade. An expensive service, only offered to Prince and Prince’s richest clients.”  He tapped his fingers against his knees, made an abortive gesture toward the pocket where he kept his cigarette case, and flashed a grin. “And a good thing, too, because persuading people of their own best interests and then finding them new, safer lives ate into the savings, and I need the bonus money.”

“Do you mean to say,” said Lamb, “that you have been paid to murder people, and arranged new identities for them instead?”

“Yes,” said Crowley. “Give me the names and I’ll tell you which ones I sent where, and you can make trunk calls to Jeannette and Doris, tell them that the dominos are falling, and they’ll put you in touch. I maaaay have promised all these people that they’d have their days of reckoning, though, and it’s not quite time for that yet. A critical number of dominos have to fall, first. I expect fighting my fraud charges to buy us enough time for that.”

“Your fraud charges?”

“Yes, the ones resulting from the package of evidence Scotland Yard will have received by the time we all get back.”

“You’ve - sent Scotland Yard evidence against yourself in cases of fraud,” said Lamb.

“Oh, yes.” Aziraphale’s face crinkled and he looked admiringly at Crowley. “Carbon copies of the relevant documents, mostly. I’ve been stashing them for him for years now. In the meat safe in the kitchen at the bookshop. My dear, I’m sure Ruth would allow you to smoke in here if you need to.”

Crowley’s face did odd things, and Frank wished for the solid wall of the dark glasses again. Watching that face without them was like watching a naked man. “Nyeahh, no ashtrays. Bad for the books. And I don’t really like smoking, you know.” The fingers of one hand twitched, and he braced it against his knee. “Anyway, yeah, fraud. We do a fair amount of it at Prince and Prince, some for clients, some for other branches of the Foundation. Also a lot of legitimate work, of course; nobody’s out there doing nothing but crime, all day. The thing about the way Old Mr Prince set things up, y’see, is that the crimes are spread out. One person obtains information, another person sees how to use it to benefit the Foundation - mostly by generating more income or influence - any legitimate actions are taken by the obvious person, but illegitimate actions - lots and lots of people who have no interest or knowledge do lots and lots of small actions, and one person, with no personal reason to commit a crime, is told off to commit the actual crime, while the entire Foundation arranges itself to protect him from discovery. If discovery happens anyway, the Foundation decides whether to protect him or to throw him to the wolves - and the decision is usually in favor of protection, because the Foundation is set up so that to protect one of us is to protect all of us. But the more investment the Foundation has in you, the better protected you are.” 

His hands began to move with his speech, sketching a kind of spiderweb in the air. “At the periphery there’s connections - people like Jeannette and Mrs Potts and Mickey, people who are completely innocent, themselves, and not part of the Foundation at all, who can be left twisting in the wind with impunity because they don’t lead anywhere. They can even be destroyed, if necessary, and they are particularly vulnerable if the person connecting them to the Foundation values them, but the Foundation doesn’t.”

“Like Mr Fell here,” said Inspector Lamb. “You’d do any number of crimes to protect him, I daresay. But I don’t suppose this Foundation of yours cares about him.”

“Exactly.” Crowley nodded. “Then there’s tertiary assets, like Hastur; people who start as connections and can be hired, or tricked, or induced in some way to do things that it’s not safe or convenient for more important people to do, and can be paid or pressured into forming part of the active network. Beating people half-senseless to send a message to their relations isn’t something you can expect someone like me to do routinely, but it’s second nature to Hastur. The most dangerous criminal work is generally done by tertiary assets, and they are protected as long as they behave, but they and theirs are burned ruthlessly - often by other tertiary assets - if they don’t.”

“Excuse me. Burned means killed?”

Crowley shrugged. “Incapacitated. Shut up forever. Rendered innocuous. More than one way to do that and the man on the ground has free rein for his judgement. But it’s important you understand the structure here. So. That was tertiary assets. Secondary assets are the boys who passed the initial tests for the Prince scholarship but didn’t make the final cut. Eleven new boys per year, trained to be the infrastructure of the upper classes and the newly rich - think about that, now. Valets. Personal secretaries. Confidential clerks in all sorts of sensitive firms. Butlers. Dealers in valuable goods. One per year is assigned as manservant to a graduated Prince Boy, to spy on and support us, and the rest are spread out - all over the place. In stately homes. In elite businesses. Keeping everything running smoothly in ten new situations per year.”

“And all of them working for the Foundation as well as for their own masters,” said Frank. “Getting paid by the Foundation to tell them, oh, things that will affect the stock markets, or where valuable jewelry will be, or what security precautions an institution takes.”

“Whose secrets are worth blackmailing them over, and how much we can be expected to pay, yes,” said Aziraphale. “Who know all about fencing goods, duplicating jewelry, creative accounting, and the technical side of crime. They’re really the most valuable people in the entire network. The whole thing will fall apart, once they start to unravel.”

Crowley nodded. “Aziraphale’s the one who realized that. The Foundation has to protect them, because they’ve invested lots of time, effort, and money in them, and because of what they do, and because any two or three of them, pooling their efforts and their knowledge, could bollocks up the entire operation for at least a short time, and ruin quite a few of the next layer in, which is Prince Boys. The doctors, bankers, brokers, lawyers, and so on - us poor boys made over into gentlemen by the munificence of the Prince Foundation. We are valued above rubies, and we are protected by the entire rest of the network - as long as we repay our investment and acknowledge our primary loyalty to the Prince Foundation.” A sneer distorted his face. “I don’t own my flat, Inspector. The Foundation does. I don’t pay Erich’s salary. The Foundation does. I work directly for Prince and Prince, which can not only fire me, but get me disbarred at the drop of a hat. All my money - that they are aware of - is held in their bank or handled by their brokerage.  If I betray the Foundation, the Foundation strips me naked and destroys everyone I care about, while protecting every part of itself I can touch. Maybe I can take down part of it, for good; maybe I can send some tertiary and secondary assets and one or two other Prince Boys to prison. But the Foundation doesn’t sit still while I do it. It deploys the rest of the network to plant evidence, reveal and magnify my part in their crimes, wreck those I care about, and subvert justice generally. And the core asset - the Foundation itself - goes right on. Maybe a little more circumspectly, for a few years; but it’s already circumspect. And the people at the heart of it, the central layer - Mr L Prince, his son Mr B Prince, their loyal secretary Miss Cecilia Dagon - they are fine.”

“You seem to have a low opinion of the British judicial system,” said Lamb.

Crowley shrugged. “I’ve seen it in action, sorry.”

“But you want to take the Foundation down anyway,” said Frank. “So you’re confessing to fraud -“

“Not confessing to a damn thing. I sent in evidence against myself, anonymously.”

“- implicating your firm, presumably - and arranged for Hastur to split on you about murders you haven’t committed - while expecting the Foundation to harm your friends and get away with everything anyway. I don’t see the point here.”

“Were Crowley’s supposed murders the only crimes Hastur talked about?” Aziraphale asked.

“No, he also had a lot to say about thefts and fences and front operations. But you say the Princes will protect those.”

“Oh, they will.” Crowley’s fingers were white, pressed against his knees, and his knees had started to bounce slightly. “But I made calls to the other violent tertiary assets I know at the same time, so the Foundation will be dealing with whatever they do about what I told them - while not having Hastur’s intimidation services, or my talent for making people go away, and with any luck without the violent services of the assets I called. Plus, they’ll be protecting me - and others, because there isn’t a single fraud I’m associated with that doesn’t implicate at least one other person - and -“ He leaned forward, grinning like a fox - “This all started because something’s doing at the heart of the mess. I don’t know what. But Mr B told me, if you hadn’t gotten an arrest by Saturday, I was to feed someone to you, because in poking around the Fells you were poking too close to the Foundation and they wanted you to go away. He wouldn't have done that if nothing was up. So I expect them to be a little busy and the dominos to keep falling, whittling away at their resources while they scramble to cover an increasing number of problems.”

“Don’t forget the Erichs, dear boy,” said Aziraphale. 

“No, no, I could never forget the Erichs. Any one of those fellows could have been the Prince Boy of their year, and in fact the Prince Boy of their year could never - he’ll tell you himself - he never could have beaten out any one of them. But the Foundation couldn’t bear to break up a matched set of three, so they’re ironing collars and spying on toffs and staying up late in the servants’ hall while people like me drive flash cars and work the parties. It’s a bit of a grudge with them, honestly. And you don’t want the ones who make the whole system work bearing a grudge against you, sir, you really don’t. I have no idea what they’re going to do, but I told Erich I’d started the dominos falling and by now he and his brothers are doing whatever they can to start more dominos falling, and keep them falling, in the right direction. And I believe they can do it. I’ve bet my life on it. Worse, I’ve bet Angel’s life on it.”

“By the time Crowley’s arrest for fraud begins to concern the Princes, they should already be rather busy protecting other flanks, and, we hope, stripped of most of their experienced violent assets,” said Aziraphale. “The plan has always been for the people we’ve helped to start new lives, who still want to pursue justice against those who paid to have them killed, to start popping up in pursuit of it sometime in the middle of those proceedings. Preferably all at once, but of course the timing may not work out ideally. But if you bring Crowley in as a material witness to their disappearances now - well, it makes the timing much more difficult, and may possibly disrupt the flow of dominos, probably while their potential to do violence is barely reduced at all.”

“If I have to do gaol time, or get disbarred, to bring down the Prince Foundation and get free of Old Mr Prince, then I have to,” said Crowley. “I don’t say I don’t mind, but I can’t say I haven’t earned it and as long as Angel’s all right he’ll still have room in the bookshop for me when I need a place to stay. But I can’t turn on them effectively if they’re still able to hurt him. And if we risk everything and come out the other side with them still able to pretend to raise poor boys up to a better life while they’re tying them lives of to criminal slavery - if the Prince Foundation doesn’t crumble to dust under the weight of its own sins - well, that won’t be acceptable, that’s all. If you think it’s your duty to take me in, then I’ll go. But if you do, and the dominos stop falling, I -“

Aziraphale put his hand on his arm. “You’ll be very annoyed, yes, dear boy. But honestly, Inspector, he’s not a flight risk at all. The Lamb’s funeral is tomorrow. He won’t run away before he’s been to that. And he won’t run away before he’s done all he can to, to see justice done to him.”

He won’t run away from you while you wait for your last remaining brother to stand trial for your favorite brother’s murder, thought Frank. 

The Inspector harrumphed. “Well, there’s sense in that, certainly. And I won’t deny, the thought of driving you and the cousins Fell all the way to Milltown tonight in the same car is not one the attracts me. Don’t make me regret leaving you at large, sir.”

“I’ll try not to,” said Crowley.

--
It had long been dark, but the rain had ceased, by the time the Milltown and London police cars bore their loads of suspects and policemen away. Janey sat in the front, visibly clinging to Crowley's assurances that she'd be free in the morning, while her in-laws rode in the back. Aziraphale offered to feed PC Shadwell supper, but he preferred to ride his pushbike back to his own home. And then there were only Mickey, Uriel, Crowley, Aziraphale, and the servants.

“I’ve made up the Green Room and the Chrysanthemum Room for you and Mr Crowley,” said Mrs Danvers, meeting the two of them in the hall after they saw the cars off. “When would you like supper? They ordered cockaleekie soup, beef medallions, carrots, roast potatoes, and apple tart this morning and the cook’s got it all in train.”

Aziraphale wrung his hands, trying not to scratch nonexistent lice. “Mickey will need a tray, if she’s even awake. Why don’t you have trays for all of us - the menu sounds lovely - and we’ll sort ourselves out. I have no idea whether Uriel will prefer to eat on her own, or in company.”

“Very good, sir.” Mrs Danvers retreated toward the offices, wearing her respectability like a cloak over what must have been a deal of uncertainty.

“Uriel won’t want my company,” said Crowley, who had retrieved his spare sunglasses from his glove compartment when he went out to assist the footman to reinflate his tyres, fetch the bags in, and drive the cars to shelter in the stable block. “Hasn’t in years. You eat with her, Angel. You’ll make her feel better. I’ll inhale a few things and go straight to bed. It’s been a hell of a day.”

“A hell of a week,” said Uriel, standing like a dim ghost on the first floor landing. “You didn’t kill Papa, did you, Uncle Crowley?”

She hadn’t called him Uncle Crowley since LIgur died. He shook his head, looking up at her. Aziraphale could see his sad, weary eyes from the sides, not that he needed to. “I didn’t save him. You were nine. It all came to the same thing. How is she?”

“She’s asleep.” She shivered. “It’s creepy. That room, I mean. And I’m not nine anymore. Will you, will you two - I may never come here again. Will you show me the house?”

They showed her the house. The safe in the study had already been opened - Mickey had remembered the combination Pater always used, which no one had apparently ever thought to change - and the ledgers for the past five years carried away as evidence, but Aziraphale took a moment to go through the filing cabinet and found what he wanted without difficulty. Crowley’s eyebrows went up when he read the page over Aziraphale’s shoulder. “All right, I’ll take care of it,” he said; and Aziraphale put it back and took Uriel into the library. 

For Uriel’s sake, he and Crowley managed to dredge up happy stories, as many of them as they could manage about Mickey, in every room they showed her, from the library to the Little Room Next to the Nursery. They found the remnants of the original 17th-century translation of The Book of the Angel Aziraphale shredded, stamped, and strewn all over the floor of the schoolroom. Aziraphale knelt to gather up the scraps, eyes stinging, as they crumbled between his fingers. “I had no idea my book made Bolt so unhappy,” he said, hearing his voice go small. 

A warm, familiar hand landed on one shoulder; a smaller, more hesitant one on the other. “Gabe made himself unhappy over the book,” said Crowley. “That’s not the same thing.”

“It’s not your fault, Uncle Sunshine,” said Uriel. “Kids take hold of these grudges, and by the time they grow up, they’re habits and they don’t think to examine them and see if they make any sense.”

Aziraphale set his handful of crumbly, illegible seventeenth-century scraps on the tutor’s desk, unable to bring himself to put them into the wastebin. “And then grievances fester and turn septic,” he said. “Ah. Speaking of. And this is not, I don’t blame you, I should have spoken seriously to Mickey about this quite some time ago - I don’t actually like being called Sunshine. I never did. Not even from the Lamb, really. When Mickey says it I feel like a lapdog, and from Bolt and Sandy - ugh!” He turned to give her a smile, so she’d know not to make too much of it.

“All right, Uncle Azifer - Azirafell -“ She shook her head, frowning with effort.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley drawled. “It’s not that hard.”

That wouldn’t do. “Not for you, dear boy,” Aziraphale said. “But even you say Angel most of the time.”

“Angie used to call you Uncle Angel,” said Uriel.

“She still does.” He led them out of the schoolroom, and shut the door behind them. “If you’d prefer to use that than to learn to pronounce Aziraphale, that’s perfectly acceptable.”

“No it’s not. I may call you that, but I’ll learn to say your name right, too.” She bit her bottom lip. “If I rang Angie up, do you think she’d want to talk to me?”

“I have every reason to think so,” said Aziraphale.

Mickey woke up enough that they all had their supper trays together in her room. The bullet had passed cleanly through her arm to be dug out of the carpet by one of the policemen. As long as Uriel drove the Lagonda and she went to a doctor straight from the funeral, there was no reason to anticipate problems. She looked about ten years older than she really was (Aziraphale supposed he did, too), but she tried to be her own businesslike self. “We have so much to do,” she said.

“Nothing that won’t wait until after the funeral,” said Aziraphale busying himself with roast potatoes to avoid reacting to the phantoms crawling beneath his clothing and over his scalp. “And talking to Ruth.”

“Ruth will be in gaol.”

“I doubt it,” said Crowley. “She’s been released on her own recognizance by now, unless she got a magistrate who hates women pretty savagely. I’m not saying she might not do time for participating in the fraud eventually, but she’ll be free for the funeral.”

“Even if she were in gaol, they allow visitors and correspondents,” said Aziraphale. “In addition to arranging her legal counsel -“

“I can take that on, her and Janey both, Angel, don’t worry about that.”

“I’d need to learn where she took the children, and how she wanted me to explain things to them, and oh, my goodness, I hope you’re right!”

“I need to give up the Richmond house and move to Milltown,” said Mickey. “There’s not a moment to be lost if any of those factories are to be salvageable. Will you be making Mildred manager at the bookshop when you move up here, Sunshine?”

Aziraphale felt both Uriel’s and Crowley’s eyes on him as he finished his bite of beef. “My name isn’t Sunshine, dear, and why on earth should I move up here?”

“We’ve always called you Sunshine. Running the Estate from London may be possible once the dust has settled, but it’ll take a year for the repercussions of this week to play themselves out, at least, and the Estate will need someone on top of things, not just a steward or business manager. I’m not sure what the law says about Bolt running it from prison, but I know he’ll do a terrible job if he’s allowed to, and, and odds are good he’ll, well,” She took a moment to breathe and blink, and Aziraphale wanted to reach out to her, but knew better. Her voice was steady when she finally said: “Odds are, he’ll never be back. Like it or not, for all practical purposes you’re head of the family now.”

“If you believed that you’d make some effort to remember how I prefer to be called,” said Aziraphale. “This is not, after all, the first time I’ve mentioned it. But I do not want to quarrel tonight, and I am not the head of the family. Fiver is still the heir, and as his parent, and Gabriel’s next of kin, Ruth will be running things. I must remember to tell her about Janey’s cottage and poultry.”

“Mmargh,” said Crowley, poking unenthusiastically at his boiled carrots. “You’re the nearest male relative not under criminal charges. Most likely the court’ll appoint you guardian regardless.”

“Then I will consult with her on the regular about how she wants to run things,” Aziraphale declared. “I’m serious. I will do my duty, but my duty is to Ruth and the children, not to this land or this building. I’d as soon have charge of a white elephant. Sooner. I could give children rides on a white elephant. This place has outlived its usefulness.”

“I don’t know,” said Uriel. “You could fit quite a few people escaping the Hitler government in here, and on those empty farms.”

To the best of Aziraphale’s knowledge, the plan of involving the Family in assisting German emigres had never been mentioned to Uriel.  He did not have to force himself to smile at her. “What a capital idea! I’ll be sure to suggest it to Ruth.”

Mickey made an odd humming sound under her breath, pushing apple tart around on her plate. “So. What Bolt said - about your mother -“

“Doesn’t matter,” said Aziraphale. “Pater accepted him. Whoever his biological father was, Josh was as much your brother as I am.”

“We were children,” said Mickey. “It bothered us when he remarried. And then she was in London so often, and the Lamb really didn’t look like anybody - but I stopped blaming her a long, long time ago. Bolt had no business calling her what he did.”

“No, he didn’t. But wouldn’t it be grand, if that were his worst offense?”

“By that point,” said Crowley, “he probably needed to convince himself he hadn’t had his own brother killed. I was terrified you’d tell him Uriel was your daughter, because then he and Sandy’d know they had you over a barrel and could make you do anything - but maybe you should have told him. Maybe if he’d known she was his niece, he’d have backed down.”

“He wouldn’t have,” Uriel said. “I don’t look like anybody, either.”

Mickey took her hand, and sighed. “Even if you did - he was in too deep, and too determined to dig himself deeper. Just because I love him doesn’t mean I’m willing to lie to myself about him.” She leaned back and closed her eyes. 

Mickey fell asleep and Uriel excused herself to take a bath as soon as the trays were cleared away and the servants released for the night. Crowley and Aziraphale went back downstairs to the study to make telephone calls and drink brandy. Aziraphale let Crowley call Erich and some legal contacts first, and then he rang up Magdala, discovering that Ruth had stopped by after being released (as Crowley had predicted) on her own recognizance, but she and the children were staying somewhere in Kent and had not left a telephone number, lest Gabriel or Sandy discover it. She had, however, provided the number of a woman named Miss Silver who would be able to pass on messages, so after he’d told Magdala, and Magdala and Anathema and Sgt Shadwell (still on guard against anti-semites and witches) had told him, of the day’s events, once everyone was certain that everyone else they cared about was still alive and out of immediate danger, he opened the line again and gave Miss Silver’s number to the exchange. Crowley had fallen asleep in the worn wing chair, still frosted with dog hair, where Pater had used to sit reading after his day’s work was done, so Aziraphale spoke softly to the woman who answered the telephone, and watched the dear profile jutting up from the back of the chair, slack and vulnerable - he had removed the glasses, again, when it was only they two in the study - while he waited for the extension to pick up.

“Miss Silver speaking,” said a prim voice on the receiver.

“This is Mr A. Z. Fell,” said Aziraphale, “Ruth Fell’s brother-in-law. I’m sorry for disturbing you so late.”

“Not at all, Mr Fell. I was just finishing a jumper for my niece. How may I be of assistance?”

“First of all, I understand that I have you to thank for your services to Ruth in extracting her from the mess we’ve all been in this week, so thank you, very much.”

“You’re welcome, but indeed, Lady Auldmon did almost everything herself. She only needed an objective ear, and a safe place for the children. They are delightful children. A little high strung, perhaps, but if she has a free hand with them in the future there is every reason to believe that this can be corrected.”

“Do not discount the value of an objective ear, dear lady! You provided what she needed, when she needed it badly, which I’m afraid is more than her family has ever done for her. Her finances may be a little tied up for the foreseeable future, but rest assured, I will see your fee covered in a timely manner if she cannot. In the meantime, I will not press you to tell me where she is, but I understand you have made yourself available to bear messages to her? I’m calling from the family estate, where matters developed rather rapidly this afternoon, and she really should be aware of them.”

“By all means. One moment while I put down my knitting and take up my pen - there we are. What do you wish me to communicate to her?”

So he got through the sorry story of the confrontation and arrest, forseeing a dreary future of having to do so again and again: for the police, for the court, and intermittently, perhaps, for the rest of his life. Miss Silver, at least, had no impertinent questions or comments, but listened to the barest-bones account he could give and read back the chief points to him in a brisk but sympathetic voice. “Dear me, what a dreadful time you’ve had,” she said. “But Lady Auldmon will be relieved to learn that the truth has been revealed. I will call her at once. She and the children plan to attend the funeral tomorrow. Shall I tell her she will see you there?”

“Yes, please. Crowley, Mickey, Uriel, and I should be able to drive back in plenty of time, and I will try to impress on Mickey that she should allow Ruth to see her wound for herself and not try to make her take her word for it that she’s all right.” He sighed involuntarily. “I’m afraid we’re a very obstinate family. What’s left of us.”

“Obstinacy is certainly a flaw, but it is at base only the virtue of perseverance, carried to an unhealthy extreme, and you will all require perseverance in the coming days, so perhaps it’s as well. You have several grievous losses to mourn, for which I extend my greatest sympathy. It would be untrue to say that it is almost over, for I’m afraid that in the nature of legal processes you still have a great many unpleasant days to weather; but at least there should be no new shocks waiting in the immediate future and you have some hours now to rest and husband your strength. I suggest to you, as I suggested to Lady Auldmon, that you make the most of them.”

“I will endeavor to do so, thank you. Good night, Miss Silver.”

The phantoms on his skin seemed marginally fewer now, as he sat with his hand on the receiver, the banker’s lamp on the desk making a reasonable-sized island of light in a sea of shadow. Crowley, half grounded in the light and half drowned in darkness, breathed deep and slow. Aziraphale felt the emptiness of the house looming above him, and the inert mass of the corpse anchoring the decay in the west wing. Not so very far, really, from the crypt of the chapel, where his father would, when the law had finished with him, be interred at last, with all proper rites, between the mothers of his children. “What a shambles you made of us all, Pater!” He spoke into the darkness. “I suppose you did your best with the mess you inherited, but what a ghastly failure this family is, all the same!”

“Wha-hm?” Crowley sat up, alert and tense. “Angel?”

“It’s all right, my dearest,” said Aziraphale, standing and reaching down a hand to him. “Let’s bathe and go to bed. The tub in the first floor guest bath will hold us both, I think, the servants won’t disturb us, and both Uriel and the kitchen should be done drawing hot water out of the boiler by now. I’m sure you could use a soak after what Gabriel did to you, and I- I hate to trouble you but I need - I need help getting rid of the lice.”

--
Inspector Eatough was of the opinion that Ann, Jane, and Ruth Fell would, if they cooperated, get all the leniency the court could grant them. “Lord Auldmon that died, he was popular enough in his day, but he couldn’t keep a wife alive, could he? Powerful hard on its women, that family is, and we all know it; and as for poor Janey Doortok that was, if she’s so creep-mouse you want to stamp on her, don’t we all know it’s because her father stamped on her first? Drove her mother to drink and never gave his daughter a moment’s peace, threw her to that Sandy Fell to tie him and all the Fell family business to the firm without a thought for her. We don’t know Dr Fell, for he only practiced out in the village, but stands to reason he’s all of a piece with the boy he raised, doesn’t it? Gabriel Fell is the worst thing that ever happened to those factories. Driven ‘em right into the ground, they are. Get a competent manager into his place, and it won’t be any trouble to make us believe he’s any kind of cheat or fool.” He mopped up the gravy of his hot pot with a heel of bread.

“Being found a cheat or fool is the least of his problems,” said Inspector Lamb. “If Gabriel doesn’t swing for his little brother it’ll be because he got a sharp barrister and a stupid jury and turns about to put it all on his cousin. I can’t see Sandalphon walking free on this earth again.”

“I hope none of those men do,” said Frank Abbot. “By all accounts Dr Fell was an enthusiastic accessory after the fact to the murder of his nephew, and perfectly ready to undertake murder on his own account. What a nightmare for the family if any of them comes back! Especially Ruth - Lady Auldmon, I mean - and Jane Fell.”  He drank the stout left in his mug, and wondered if he should order another. On the whole, he thought not. He had never driven so much in his life before as he had today, and it had left him with the odd sensation that he was still doing it. “The jury won’t like Janey, I’m afraid. She’s timid, she has an obvious pash on Crowley, and the idea of her husband hanging seems to please her a great deal. The defense will destroy her in cross-examination.”

“They’ll like Miss Ligur and Aziraphale, though, and they’ll believe Mrs Hostmassif all right. In any case, that’s the judge and the public prosecutor’s lookout, not ours,” said Inspector Lamb. “It’s an obscure, nasty case, but we solved it without any doubt and without much in the way of additional damage, so we’ve done our jobs well. Take the satisfaction and enjoy it, for tomorrow will mean new problems for us.”

“Did we solve it, though?”  This notion had been bothering Frank. “Lady Auldmon essentially handed it to us, and only because that enquiry agent won her confidence. If we had been a properly reassuring presence when interviewing witnesses -“

“That way lies madness,” Inspector Eatough interrupted. “Witnesses and private enquiry agents don’t solve cases. Only policemen do that. I’m thinking I should order a pudding to celebrate your success. What do you think?”

--

The Milltown Intelligencer once again scooped the London dailies, but the sensational eruption of the case all over the afternoon editions drew plenty of gawpers when Raziel Joshua Fell’s casket was lowered into the ground. Since he had been an agnostic and his wife was a non-practicing Jew, there had been no religious rites, but a number of people, starting with his wife and rippling out to political associates, stood up to say a few words about him. It all boiled down to: He was a good young man who should not have died, whose memory will live after him, and we miss him dreadfully.

During the ceremony, Frank had sat at the back of the little hall and Miss Silver (in full Edwardian mourning down to the jet beads) toward the front, behind the family’s row, but at the graveside he found himself standing between her and Newton Pulsifer in the protective ring between the curious crowds and the huddled remnants of the Fells of Auldmon Abbey: Mrs Hostmassiff managing to look regal even with her arm in a sling, Miss Ligur a shade less cool and composed than usual at her shoulder, Lady Auldmon and the sad-faced restless children, Aziraphale and Crowley with Magdala Fell between them. He did not speak to the enquiry agent until they had taken their part in a sort of honor guard flanking the family, allowing them to reach the Bentley and Lagonda standing at the kerb and drive off without speaking to a reporter, and they were both left behind in the dispersal: Mrs Potts and Pulsifer bearing Shadwell away complaining that he hadn’t had a chance to explain to the multitudes how the boy’s inherent witchcraft had been staved off; Miss Device, Miss Hodges, and the theater crowd on their way to drink to the deceased’s memory and the health of his widow; other people Frank didn’t recognize returning, presumably, to their ordinary lives, while the gawpers surged in at last to see the rectangular mound of earth growing above the Westminster Bridge Body, for what good that would do them. 

“A melancholy meeting,” said Frank Abbot to Miss Silver. “But it would have been an even sadder occasion without you. You quite showed the police up, appearing with the answer in the nick of time, like a good witch in a fairy tale.”

“You talk a deal of nonsense,” said Miss Silver, “but I thank you for your good opinion, and am glad to have been able to give Lady Auldmon such support as I was able at a crucial time. She would, you may have no doubt, have told the truth very soon, with or without me; but the confrontation at the Abbey would in all likelihood have resulted in some new catastrophe, had she spoken any later, or you and the Inspector been less prompt to act. As the poet Tennyson reminds us, ‘A day may sink or save a realm,’ and that was certainly true in this case.”

Tennyson? Frank thought. But I suppose he was all the rage when she was young. Someday I’ll quote Eliot to someone and be laughed at, I daresay. “You’ve heard what went on there, then?”

“I am sure I am missing many details, and the newspaper accounts leave me with a number of questions, but Mr Fell called last night and relayed a precis of events to me to pass on to Lady Auldmon. A very courteous gentleman.”

“I daresay I’m missing details myself,” said Frank. “It was all confusing enough when we got there, and what the new Lord Auldmon thought he was doing at the last is beyond me, but with any luck he’ll get the whip hand of his barrister and tell us all about it at the trial.”

“I have never met him, of course,” said Miss Silver, “though I believe I have met people like him before. People who are so convinced of their central place in the world, that their self-interest seems to them to constitute a moral imperative. Is he indeed arrogant enough for that?”

“I believe so,” said Frank. He found that he was reluctant to end the conversation, though beyond the keen intelligence in her eyes, there was no rational basis for his conviction that he stood at the door of a treasure house that would well repay the effort of opening it for a glimpse of what lay within. “I have half an hour before I have to return to the salt mines of the law,” he said. “What if we had a dish of tea and compared notes?”

“My notes are confidential,” said Miss Silver, “and I must catch the train to Ledlington a little after six o’clock, but a dish of tea would be refreshing, thank you. I believe there is a tea shop on the next street.”

--
“They won’t want a bunch of Jews there,” said Magdala. She was on her third glass of red wine, and getting flushed and argumentative, which in Ruth’s professional opinion was all to the good. “The people of the village. They will grumble and you will lose favor.”

Most of the post-funeral guests had come and gone, leaving two small clusters in the bookshop: Aziraphale, Crowley,  and the bewildering Mrs Potts in the back room, and three women on the gold velvet chairs in the front, beside surfaces temporarily cleared of books (by stacking them on the floor) and groaning with offerings of food and alcohol. 

“But it won’t be a bunch of Jews,” Ruth said. “It’ll by Master Joshua’s father-in-law that’s an architect, to see if there’s anything to be done to the old place, and his mother-in-law that’s come with him rather than be all alone in that dark dreary Germany among foreign people, and the widow’s sister, poor lamb. How’s his English? Will he be able to talk to the local builder and consult with him on materials and available labor force and listen sympathetically to all the things he’s been saying for years ought to be done that it might be too late to do now? He’s a Device, if that helps. And he went to grammar school, so his Lancashire isn’t particularly broad.”

“That is a lie,” said Anathema, mixing herself another whiskey and soda. “I can barely understand Young Tom, myself. But Little Tom could translate.”

Ruth shook her head. She was still on her first brandy and not at all sure even that much was wise, but Gabriel and Sandy were in custody, the Lamb was in the ground, her children were playing with the baker’s grandchildren in the well-lit courtyard under the grouchy, vigilant eye of Sergeant Shadwell, and after nearly twenty years of limiting her alcohol intake to prevent herself from becoming addicted to drink, she had earned one brandy. “By the time we can get Herr Hoffman there, Young Tom will be retired and Little Tom will have taken over completely instead of only mostly.  And not before time!”

“Oh, yes, that’s entirely different,” said Anathema. “It’s not a bad idea, Mags. And there’s been a manpower shortage since the War, with so many boys leaving to try their luck in the cities as soon as they’re grown, so even bringing over people to do the labor shouldn’t get them up in arms, as long as they work on their English and don’t give themselves airs. I don’t say there won’t be talk when they don’t go to church on Sunday, but the present Vicar won’t encourage it, and if you did up one of the empty cottages as a synagogue, and they knew there was a, a Jewish Sunday on Saturday - I’m not saying there’d be no friction, I’m not saying it’ll be as good as you deserve, and I’m definitely not saying you should expect to be accepted wholeheartedly into Lancashire society, but - these are my people, and there’s no Hitler egging them on to be their worst selves.”

“Well, I will think about it,” said Magdala. “And I will find out my father and mother’s opinion. We do not have to decide today. We do not even know how much money there is, if there is any, or who will not be in gaol, yet. But I think most of the people who need to get out, they will be more comfortable in cities, if we can manage the original plan instead. It is not only Jews, either, that we want to help. It is Roma, and Communists, and homosexuals. We all know how savage you British are, on homosexuals.”

“In theory, yes, and in practice, far too often,” said Ruth, looking through the round arch to the back room, where Mrs Potts was reading cards for Crowley. Her idea of funeral attire was a headband with a frowsty black ostrich plume and a dark velveteen frock with beaded jet fringes, and she wore so many cosmetics that the tears she’d shed off and on all day only smeared the top layer; but her eyes were kind and her hands were busy. Crowley submitted to her reading of the cards with good-natured boredom, and Sun - no, she must stop that - Aziraphale, leaning on Crowley’s shoulder, watched them both with exhausted fondness. “But the last time I spoke to Old Mr Nutter, you know what he said to me? He said, not quite out of the blue because we were talking about the state of the Family: It’s good that Master Aziraphale has that Mr Crowley looking after him in London, among all those sharp city folks. And he winked at me!” She sipped at her brandy, and watched Magdala’s face. “If you asked him about either Jews or homosexuals, Old Mr Nutter’d say something along the lines of not holding with them, or that hellfire awaits them, or something horrid like that, but you put one in front on him? Then they’re real people, and that’s different.”

“It’s not much to bank on,” said Magdala. “We have people like that in Germany, too, and you cannot tell how the cat will jump, when it matters. But do not think I reject your generosity out of hand.”

“It’s not generosity,” said Ruth. “It’s your due. You’re family. Which I understand may not seem worth much, given what you’ve learned about the Family recently.”

“I have learned that Fells do not play by halves, and that is terrifying, but - as long as you are on my side, well,” Magdala shrugged. “I have been terrified a long time. I’m used to it.”

In the back room, Mrs Potts tittered and started gathering up her cards as Crowley shook his head and set down his empty wine glass. They all stood and Mrs Potts wafted out to the front, Crowley and Aziraphale following not quite hand in hand. “I’m off,” she said, “no rest for the wicked, and the gentleman that comes on Saturday nights is such an old hand it’ll be a comfort to see him, but it takes me twenty minutes to get into the leather pinny these days, nor you don’t need me hanging about forever. Good night, my loves, and remember if you ever need me to draw aside the veil I will do my humble best.” She kissed them all round, coyly allowed Aziraphale to help her into a fringed shawl that had seen better days, and departed. 

Ruth took the last mouthful of brandy. “I should call the children in and get a cab to the house.” She did not look forward to staying in the Kensington house, with the long, dreary years of her marriage haunting every turn; but it was home to the children, and they wouldn’t have it long, for she was letting it go in favor of something more affordable as soon as ever she could. She had slept well for the last three nights, in a strange house in Kent with her conscience easy for the first time in years. Four nights in a row was too much to hope for, under the circumstances.

“I can take you,” said Crowley. “Got an errand to run will keep me out late enough, even if I start now, and it’s not out of my way to drop you.”

“Must you?” Aziraphale sounded forlorn. He and Crowley had been drinking red wine, too, and it was no more in Aziraphale’s nature to drink moderately than it was to eat or read or love moderately. “Surely it will wait until tomorrow.”

“You saw the same cards Madame Tracy read out: do what should be done now, or miss the chance. I’ve got a stack of paperwork to get through tomorrow, just setting this family up for what’s bearing down on all of us, with interrelated cases in two different jurisdictions and all of us mixed up in both, one way or another. Janey's free on bond for now and has a place to stay, but she’ll need active handholding soon or she’ll fret herself to death. Not just any barrister will do for her, either.  Ruth's affairs are a right mess and there's no way out of dealing with Sandy's father-in-law. The sooner I get all my ducks in a row the better.” He looked down at Aziraphale, not touching him, his glasses firmly on his nose. If Ruth had to stand up in court and swear “I never noticed anything between them not perfectly natural between two such old friends,” she could do it with a clear conscience, not knowing how his eyes looked at moments like these.

“Will you come back, after your errand?” Aziraphale’s pleading gaze could easily be blamed on the wine and the week’s overload of emotions. 

“Don't sit up for my sake. It’ll be late as blazes by the time I'm done. I’ll probably fall into bed at the flat and sleep straight through. See you tomorrow lunch, though. I’ll pick you up at one. You, too, Mags, if you’re up to it - there’s a new place in my neighborhood, Italian, thought we’d try it out.”

“We’ll see.” Magdala poured more wine. “I plan to drink till I am blotto and be disgusting tomorrow morning, but perhaps I will wake in time for lunch.”

They called the children in, and gathered scattered belongings, and donned coats. Magdala kissed her new sister and her new niece and her new nephew goodby, and even kissed Crowley, which would have been excessive in an Englishwoman, but Magdala wasn’t English. Aziraphale bade them all good night and pleasant dreams, and bade Crowley to take care, dear boy. The delay in Crowley emerging from the bookshop was long enough for a husbandly good night kiss, but neither Ruth nor the children saw any such thing, being preoccupied with the question of who would ride up front; a question that was settled, when Crowley emerged, by driverly fiat. “Your mum’s sitting with me,” he said, “so into the back, you hellspawn, and misbehave yourselves quietly, without kicking the front seat, or I won’t take you driving come spring and give each of you a turn in the front and a driving lesson.”

“They’re much too young to learn to drive,” Ruth protested, without much energy, as they pulled away from the kerb.

“No, we’re not,” said Phaela, “at least, I’m not. Not by spring.”

“And I ought to learn to drive, because I’m head of the family now, I think,” said Fiver. 

“No you’re not,” said Phaela, in tones of great contempt.

“I might be, though, if Pater’s going to be in gaol.” He sounded worried, and no wonder. Ruth had told them as much of the truth as she thought they could bear, and was very much afraid she had misjudged its weight. “Mr Crowley? What’s the law say?”

“The law says if you’re too young to go to Wellborn Hall you’re too young to be head of the family,” said Crowley, driving more slowly than usual, not that this meant much, through Soho’s Saturday evening traffic. “That’s your mum’s job for now, and nothing for you to worry about.”

“Too young for Wellborn Hall is too young to drive, too,” said Ruth.

“Eh, yeah, but learning to drive’s not the same thing as driving. I can show ‘em the ropes, teach ‘em the rules, without the car moving. My first driving lesson was like that. No letting the car move till they’re tall enough to see through the windscreen and reach all the pedals at the same time, I promise.”

“Well, we’ll see,” said Ruth. “Spring is a long way away.”

“It’ll be a nasty winter, but spring’s’closer than you think,” said Crowley, dodging a lorry.

--
Misty rain was falling when Crowley pulled up to the gate of the Prince Foundation. He got out of the car with the engine running to push them open, glad of his driving gloves, smooth black leather on which the damp beaded. He parked as close as he could to the portico, which would be obnoxious to anyone else who drove in, but there was no reason to expect anyone at this hour, at this time of year, and parking obnoxiously helped him into the mood to swagger properly up to the door and have the Prince sneer in place by the time the footman answered. His face lit up when he saw Crowley, who fished his name out of the back of his head. Bertie something? “Good day, Mr Crowley. We weren’t expecting you.” Bertie took his coat. 

“It’s a day, Bert, but not a very good one, I’m afraid. I’ve got business best not done by ‘phone,” said Crowley. “Old Mr Prince will want to see me. In his study?”

“Let me ask Miss Dagon,” said Bertie. “Make yourself comfortable, sir.” 

Instead, Crowley paced the hall. In November, the inhabitants would be instructors, the kitchen staff, second-tier boys learning their trades and doing all the work suitable to them, Miss Dagon, and Old Mr Prince. He could smell the ambiance of Growing Boy, feel the stirring of air rustled by boyish voices speaking several rooms away, but no one was in sight until Miss Dagon appeared. She wore her fish skeleton earrings and her smile was as welcoming and unnerving as ever, but her hair was almost all gray and cut short, with a permanent wave, and her dress was something that might have hung in a store Mickey would patronize, though she would never ever wear that deep sea shade. “Mr Crowley,” she said, “what a pleasant surprise.”

“We’ll find out about that,” said Crowley, swaggering forward to take her hands. “You look stunning as usual.”

“You’ve been drinking.”

“Ehh, a bit.  Not enough to inconvenience someone who learned to drink like a gentleman in this house. Joshua Fell’s funeral was today, had to hang about being the sympathetic friend. Is Himself free?”

“He always is at this hour. You know that.”

He grinned at her. “Yes, I do. It’s why I time my impromptu visits that way. You needn’t show me in. I know the way by now.”

“You also know the rules,” said Miss Dagon, “so lay off the cheek and come along.”

Crowley followed her, wondering how long he’d be able to keep up his front as the dominos crumbled the ground beneath her feet; how many more times she would be happy to see him; whether the arrangements he’d tried to put in place to protect the boys from tumbling back, willy nilly, onto the scant mercies of a society that had failed them since before birth would, in practice, help them at all. But there were too many variables, and the only certain thing in the world was, that he and Aziraphale would stand by each other to the end.

Old Mr Prince sat, smoking, by the fire in his study, which had been updated again to keep pace with fashion about a year ago. There was no disguising the Victorian lines of the room, but the carpet and drapes had a bold geometric design and the shades of green, brown, and white in the walls and furniture were all off the most recent decorator’s color card. Electric lights shone bright through the cigar smoke haze. The fire burned low but well, and the radiators thrummed. The room felt like an oven.  Since he was last here, over a year ago now, a small glass display case had been set up by one of the windows, its contents invisible from the door. “Here’s Mr Crowley to see you, sir,” said Miss Dagon, as if she were merely a housekeeper or a secretary.

“Thank you, Miss Dagon,” said Old Mr Prince, in a harsh, wheezy, depthless voice. His hair was finally thinning, and the hand holding the cigar looked gaunt and liver spotted. “Come in, my boy, come in. Have a seat and a cigar.”

Crowley, swallowing the shock of seeing him (When did he become frail?), waited with his hands in his pockets and his hips offset until the door closed behind her. Then he said: “No, thank you, sir,” and swaggered over to the case. “I'm here in an official capacity. You’ve been receiving stolen goods.”

The display case was smaller than the one in the library at Auldmon Hall, but it had a small bulb inside which lit the open pages. Not the Annunciation pages, but he was familiar enough with the stories to understand what was going on: King Solomon, gaudy in purple and gold and red, as many fancifully hideous demons as the artist could cram onto the page, Archangels Michael and Gabriel standing around talking big while  the Angel Aziraphale did all the work of trapping the demons in King Solomon’s Ring, the little black Serpent slithering away among the workmen’s tools. The capital at the head of the facing page had been decorated with a serpent squaring off against a knight riding a snail, and the text was an intractable lattice of precise, meaningless lines. How anyone could  read them without a headache, let alone study them closely enough to do a proper translation, was beyond him; but Aziraphale was clever with words.

“I bought it from Michael Fell IV, Lord Auldmon, the legal owner, in good faith, and for a generous sum.” Old Mr Prince smirked behind his cigar. “I don’t know anything about any encumbrances or restrictions upon it. How could I?” He sucked in a mouthful of smoke, and held it.

“For that matter, how did you even know of its existence?” Crowley returned, as he let out a series of smoke rings, one at a time. Did the old man really not know? Surely the whole country knew by now. “But that’s not the issue, is it? The issue is, you didn’t buy it from the legal owner, though you had every reason at the time to think you did.”

Old Mr Prince raised one bristling eyebrow and blinked a rheumy eye.

All right, if he wanted to play it that way. “Michael Fell IV, Lord Auldmon, suffered a stroke early in November, 1929, on learning of his heir’s losses in the American stock market crash, and never recovered. He died within three days. At that time, though it has yet to be submitted for probate, and oh God and Satan too, that ought to be Sandy’s job, this business is just one complication after another. Well, his father-in-law’ll do it, and do it properly, or I’ll know the reason why. Anyhow. Under Lord Auldmon’s will this book, The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, became the property of my client, his son, A.Z. Fell, of Soho. I got a look at the will before it got boxed up in evidence, and it does have a codicil, canceling the bequest, but it’s dated June of this year and is clearly a forgery. I don’t think it would have stood up to a proper examination even if it had been dated some time in the realm of possibility. Sandy’d apparently been a tolerably honest solicitor right up until his uncle died, and doesn’t have the expertise to carry off a good false signature.”

Crowley had thought of a lot of ways for Old Mr Prince to react, on his way here; but he wasn’t prepared for the way all the blood drained from the thin face, the way every line of it seemed to acquire several ounces more of weight, the way the hand holding the cigar slowly lowered and the end of the cigar drooped. “Mike is - Mike is dead?”

He didn’t sound like Old Mr Prince. He sounded like a sick old man who has been kicked in the chest.

“Yes, sir. For about five years.” Crowley waited for the probing questions, but they never came. Confronting those staring eyes, that pallid drooping face, he forgot all the paths he’d charted through this mess, and said what he had never, since he’d first understood what Lord Auldmon had told him so long ago, intended to tell this evil, controlling old man at all. “He remembered you. I think - no, I’m sure he missed you. Or at least the idea of you. The only true friend he ever had. As you proved, when you said no, and walked away from him, after he’d proved he was no friend to you, by assuming that you couldn’t do that.”

“He said that? To you? And you never reported it?” Old Mr Prince’s eyes were dull and blank.

Crowley shrugged. “I had no idea what he was talking about, at first. I couldn’t distinguish between significant and insignificant incidents, yet. By the time I put Luke the Charity Boy together with Mr L. Prince and his interest in the Fell family, it seemed a bit late to bring it up. I - thought you might mind my knowing.”

“Oh, I would have. You always had good instincts.” Old Mr Prince winced as ash dropped on his knee, brushed it off to glow and fade upon the new carpet, and propped the cigar in the ashtray. His hand shook slightly. Crowley’s did not. “Mike is dead. Well. Well. And his children covered it up? Even from you?”

“His oldest son, Gabe. And his brother, who was also his doctor. And his nephew, the solicitor. They all coerced their wives into being accessories. It was quite a conspiracy. Quite a performance. On a very narrow stage.”

“They were cheating the other siblings. To keep the income from the properties they would inherit.”

“Yes. Until, in Gabe’s judgement, he’d recouped enough money that they could afford to let them go.” Crowley shrugged. “Which was never going to happen. Gabe’s lousy with money.”

“I see. And now - the fraud has been discovered.”

“Yup. Joshua Fell discovered it.” Crowley summarized events into the tersest sentences he could, watching the old man’s face. He had never found it so unreadable before; had never understood less what the cold, hard brain behind the cold, hard eyes wanted. “So. That’s a mare’s nest they’ll be dealing with for awhile, and as solicitor for Angel, and Janey, and Ruth, I’ll be on the front lines of sorting it out. In addition to everything else I’ll be doing in the normal course of business. But the good news is, I don’t have to frame anybody for Josh’s murder, like your son asked me to. Sandy and Gabe’ll almost certainly be convicted, whether they swing for it or not, and we’re well before the deadline Mr B gave me, so, I’m not complaining.  But when Angel found your name on the bill of sale for his book yesterday, I told him I’d sort it out, and I’m empowered to negotiate. No need to make him initiate legal proceedings and try to drag it away from you, not when it’s all in the family like this, in a way. Figured I’d report in to you and take care of that all at once. So.” He cocked his head, looking into Old Mr Prince’s eyes without any sense that they saw him at all. “What do you want for the thing? And, what did you want the thing for, anyway?”

The eyes blinked. “I wanted Mike to die the death of a thousand cuts,” he said in that air-starved voice. “I’ve had a dozen minor operations, nibbling away at his family, for years. Buying up debts. Debauching his wife. Your drawing one of his sons into a life of unnatural vice was a delightful development, as was Ligur seducing his daughter. Ligur started his oldest son down the road of unwise financial speculation, too. A great loss to the firm, Ligur. Which is not to say you didn’t do the right thing, when you killed him. And it’s neither here nor there, in any case.” Blink, blink. “I must - I’m wandering. How strange. I’ve never wandered before.”

Old Mr Prince took a deep breath, which did not seem to benefit him much. “You mustn’t think that destroying Mike was an obsession of mine or anything like that. It was only one personal indulgence among all the business pursuits. I thought I was entitled to that, but it wasn’t something to prioritize. Not something to put on a schedule. Just a squeeze here, a squeeze there, a steady building of desperation all around. He’s been paying us blackmail about Mickey and Angel for almost as long as they’ve been paying it, themselves. That’s a grand dodge, you know. Blackmail the children to keep guilty knowledge from the parents; blackmail the parents to keep it from the husband and the police.” Another, shakier breath. 

Crowley felt sick. If Gabriel’d been paying blackmail on Mickey for five years, he and Sandy must’ve known perfectly well who Uriel was when they put the gun on her.

Oblivious, the dry thin voice resumed. “I probably should have acted earlier in his illness, but I haven’t the energy I used to, to devote to such pursuits. The economic situation has kept me rather busy and I, well, I wanted to land a really solid blow. Something that would make even a British aristocrat realize that he was, in the end, every bit as dishonorable a creeping thing as the lowest criminal. When an indisposition of my own caused me to realize how long he’d been ill, I thought I’d better make a move before I lost my chance, and reread some of your old reports. You write such entertaining reports, not like most of the boys. I always read yours, myself, instead of relying solely on Miss Dagon and her trainee clerks. It was nice to read back through them. Took me back to some very good times. And then there it was.  What could destroy Mike more thoroughly, than to break his word to his own son? To tempt him to lose his honor for money, and sell for cash his family’s unique legacy? I’d seen the book, you see, when I was at the Abbey with him on hols. I don’t know much about books, but I know what makes value in the market place of life, and this - it’s beautiful, it’s unique, it’s historical, and it’s sentimental. I even considered stealing it, back when I cut that cancer disguised as a man out of my life, when it was only a beautiful family heirloom, but I knew I didn’t have the skills then and that to steal it and be caught would be the worst humiliation for me and triumph for him imaginable. But this - it was better. A thousand times better.” He sighed, and picked up the cigar again. It had gone out. “Except that it didn’t happen.”

“What exactly was it that he’d asked of you, to make you hate him so?” Crowley asked, feeling rather as if someone had been striking him on the back of his head, firmly and steadily, with a cane for the duration of this speech; one stroke per heartbeat. 

Blink. Blink. Old Mr Prince looked past him, at the wall, or at an imperious young toff who had ceased to exist before Crowley had ever been born. “I can’t remember,” he said. “Something he assumed I would find an honor. Something that would have tied me to his side, as his inferior, for life. It doesn’t matter.” He looked at the cigar, and then at Crowley, and suddenly his eyes were not blank, but bright and wet. “You think he missed me?”

“I know he did,” said Crowley. “He knew he was in the wrong. He said as much”

“Yet he didn’t track me down to say so.”

“No. He didn’t.” Crowley shrugged. “I gathered there was considerable time lag. Maybe he assumed it would be too little, too late. Or maybe he was just a toff and wouldn’t lower himself, even after he thought he’d learned his lesson. I don’t know.”

“No, how could you?” Blink, blink, and the eyes were not wet anymore. The eyes were familiar again. “So. He’s dead. And he didn’t need me to destroy him. He had already raised up the instrument of his own destruction; of his family’s destruction. He didn’t need me for that.”  Old Mr Prince dropped the dead cigar into the ashtray and fished in his waistcoat pocket, drawing out a small object and hurling it at Crowley, who caught it: a silver key, on a fob shaped like a grinning devil, very fin-de-siecle. “Take the book,” rasped Old Mr Prince. “Take it, and get out, and don’t come here without an invitation again.”

“Yes, sir,” said Crowley. He unlocked the case, feeling the cold, hard eyes boring into his back, and picked up the book for the first time. It was heavy, the leather of the cover gritty with age as he closed it, as tenderly as he had ever taken hold of Aziraphale’s hand. “Thank you, sir.”

“Out!”

He went out, trying not to hurry, cradling Angel’s book. He mustn’t give the old man time to change his mind, but he mustn’t damage it in transit, either. Bertie was at station in the hall, hastily standing and hiding whatever he’d been doing as Crowley opened the office door with his hip. “Have you got a box, Bertie?”

Bertie led Crowley on discreetly silent feet into the busy depths of the house where Crowley, due to his lofty position, had never been. They found a bandbox of about the right size. Crowley wrapped the book in his clean silk handkerchief, and they padded it with tissue paper, closed the lid, and carried it, under an umbrella, to the car, where they placed it on the floor of the passenger side. Crowley tipped Bertie half a crown and the key on its fob. “Get a copy made of that before you find it where I dropped it getting into the car,” he said. “You may want to get into the display case in the study without picking the lock, sometime.”

“Thanks, mate,” said Bertie, insulated from prying ears by the portico and the rain. “I’m sorry about Angel’s brother and all that mess. It’s horrible.”

“You have heard about it here, then? Old Mr Prince didn’t seem to have.”

“Heard about it on the wireless in the kitchen. He never listens to the wireless. And he doesn’t read the papers much anymore. Only if Miss Dagon gives him the Times. Which she won’t, if she thinks it’ll have the wrong effect on him. She’s trying to hide it, but we all know: he’s not well. Never  has anyone in to tea or comes to dinner or goes out anymore, except once to Harley Street, and came back in a devil of a temper. He took a bad turn last Sunday, and this evening was the first time he’s been up this week. She wants to bring in a nurse but he won’t hear of it. Says he’s still in charge and will decide when he needs a nurse, dammit.” He ended this report with a tolerable Old Mr Prince imitation.

“I see,” said Crowley. “Well, it comes to us all in the end. There’ll be changes around here before long, I expect. You boys better be ready to make the best out of ‘em, whatever they are.”

“Oh, we intend to,” said Bertie.

Crowley drove off, into the rain, toward London, and the warm rich flat that wasn’t his, and the bookshop and the angel that were; toward the moment when he could allow himself to fall apart, for a little while, until he had to gather himself up again and return to the stage to play his part in the final act of the history of the Prince Foundation. In his mind’s ear, he heard the distant thunder of dominos falling.

Behind him, in a house full of boys, an old man died alone, of natural causes.
--

So it is that, to this day, angels and demons walk among us in the likeness of men and women; and so too do men and women walk in the likeness of angels and demons; but for those who live where Love is, God finds no distinction among them, and thus we carry on unto the ending of the world. Let us, then, be gentle with one another, and may the blessings of the Angel Aziraphale be upon all those who hear or read these words, no matter what oppresses them. Amen.

The Book of the Angel Aziraphale, trans. By A.Z. Fell, University of Oxford Press, 1939.

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