Chapter 10
That afternoon
Matthew could feel himself freezing up again.
He wanted to grab for the rock, and he couldn’t do that either.
He was sure that if he did, it would go sliding off the table.
Matthew could clearly hear, as if it were real, the crack as it hit the floor, sharp in his ears like a gunshot.
Now he stared down at his lap again, feeling the tension in his shoulders as if he’d shatter into shards of glass.
That had been a delusion of Charles VI of France, in his worst moments, that any sudden movement would destroy him that way.
Matthew’s mind caught onto that. He could consider it with a certain intellectual distance, because whatever was wrong with him, whatever had broken with no chance of mending in Nuremberg, wasn’t like that.
He would take some deep breaths and drink the tea that was on offer.
The overwhelming whatever it was would fade. It had to.
He’d never dealt with it with someone watching, though.
Other times, he’d been alone, in his office.
Or he’d been able to duck into the loo at Mum and Dad’s in London, take ten minutes.
The teasing when he came out was awful, but better than being stared at or people trying to help and making it worse.
Warren wasn’t making it worse. Some distant part of Matthew’s self, what felt like a thousand miles away, was fascinated by that.
Warren wasn’t rushing; he wasn’t pitying.
He wasn’t anything other than quiet and calm and steady.
There was no hint of blame, or needing to buck up. Just the reliable presence.
Hesitantly, he reached out his fingers to the rock again.
He could touch the rock, even when he couldn’t make sense of this.
He did not know why Warren had a rock like this, why he’d brought it out, even how long he’d been sitting there.
Once he was touching it, he could try words again.
“You must have other places to be. I couldn’t—” He didn’t know how to finish that sentence.
“Actually, tonight I don’t. I was on call Saturday through this afternoon. I was just going to go home and find a book, and that can wait a bit.”
“Oh.” Matthew swallowed. “I mean.” They weren’t friends.
They barely knew each other. Why was Warren being like this?
And could he even take the man to Urania’s Apples?
He didn’t think the man would cause a problem.
Certainly, anyone who was in the Penelopes had to be at least a little familiar with the idea of the odd relationships people found.
Professionally, anyway. But that didn’t mean he’d be decent about it.
On the other hand, nothing had said he’d be decent about this. And here Warren was, being decent. Not just decent, that sounded mealy and like he’d merely been average. This needed some sort of superlative Matthew absolutely couldn’t muster right now.
“Which pub?” The question was still easy, gentle. “There are quite a few choices near here.” And the various segments of the Ministry had their particular preferences.
It was certainly better than going home to a dark and too-quiet flat, and he equally obviously couldn’t ask Warren to walk him back there.
Matthew coughed. “Urania’s Apples.” He tried to say more than the admittedly odd and oddly informative name, and his tongue was too thick in his mouth to manage it.
“Not my usual, but I’ve been in there a few times.
Good cider, I gather? And a decent set of beers on tap.
When you’re ready, then.” There was a long stretched out silence.
Warren couldn’t possibly be making a pass, not right now.
Even if he’d mentioned the cider, which had particular implications at Urania’s Apples.
It made Matthew freeze still. He got stuck in it, unable to get himself to do anything other than stare down at the rock his fingers were resting on.
Warren didn’t rush him, not exactly, but somewhere in there he felt something change.
Minutes, maybe. Not hours, the light hadn’t changed, and no one had come to tidy the room.
He just kept staring at his hands, the rock, and the table, getting stuck there like he was frozen in amber or some other invisible stone.
After some amount of time, though, there was Warren’s voice, steady and firm.
“Do you need anything from your office? And do you have a coat? Ah, there it is.”
Matthew shook his head, feeling entirely lost. Though no, not lost. There was someone here who had a plan, who was fully capable of putting that plan into action.
He didn’t have to do it himself. Good thing.
If he’d been on his own, he’d have sat here until he terrified whoever came in to clean later.
“Ready as you’re getting? Can you stand up?
” It was a command voice, that was the thing Matthew recognised.
Not the way people meant that, of someone who expected to be obeyed.
This was the voice of someone who’d been painfully, viscerally, responsible for other people’s lives, and who’d taken that job as seriously as he could. The way most people didn’t.
He managed to push back from the table, leaning both hands on it to stand. Then there was a series of movements, things he couldn’t quite track. The stone was put away gently. Warren brought Matthew’s coat from the hook on the wall, handed him his satchel, then gathered up his own things.
There was no particular intimacy to it. No attempt to try to touch, not more than the brief contacts necessary.
Some part of Matthew ached for that, for the sheer idea of what it would feel like if there had been just a hair more.
A hand on his wrist, fingers on his, even just briefly.
But it didn’t feel like Warren was keeping his distance, either.
Somehow, Matthew managed one foot in front of the other, out the door, down the steps, out into the cold air.
That was bracing. It brought him a bit more back to his body, though not enough to figure out how to pull the scarf around.
The pub wasn’t terribly far, though, and the streets between the building they’d met in and the pub weren’t terribly busy.
He heard Warren say something once or twice to other people.
Once or twice he checked with Matthew as they crossed a street. Nothing that made it obvious.
Then there was the pub, and the dim but present light and the warmth nearly did him in.
Warren must have spotted a place immediately, and he guided Matthew over to it, again making no kind of obvious fuss.
Though perhaps Matthew’s ability to evaluate what was or wasn’t obvious was not reliable right now.
He did not know what it looked like. Warren bent over and murmured, once he was seated.
“They know your usual taste?” It meant Matthew could just nod.
He was alone for a couple of minutes, not long, before Warren came back, setting a glass of beer in front of him, and a bottle of cider for himself. “Soup in a minute, nothing too heavy to start.”
There was silence again until York brought round the soup, along with a plate with two rolls.
No butter, of course, it was still rationed, but Warren immediately broke one roll open and inhaled before beginning to eat it plain with his fingers.
Matthew managed a sip of his beer, then a bit of the vegetable soup.
That eased everything up a little, and it made him realise he’d had a rather scant lunch, which probably wasn’t helping anything.
The soup was restorative enough that eventually he could glance up at Warren and not immediately feel he had to look away.
“Thank you.” It seemed the first necessary thing to say.
Warren, curiously, didn’t brush it off. He sat there, having eaten the roll, looking outwardly relaxed, as if he came to this pub three times a week and knew all the regulars.
He didn’t, because Matthew would have seen him, York would have greeted him differently.
There were a dozen things that made Matthew sure that wasn’t true.
Now his brain was working a bit. Instead, Warren said carefully.
“If we don’t take care of each other, who will? ”
That answer did not help anything at all.
Matthew swallowed hard, then said, carefully, “You were a Captain, in the war, weren’t you?
” That had startled him. He’d looked up the details a couple of weeks back, finally.
He’d been surprised Warren didn’t have a higher rank, for half a dozen reasons, starting with the competence visible from a distance.
Matthew had never attracted the sort of attention to rise above Lieutenant.
“Captain.” Warren tilted his head. “I’m curious why you ask.”
“You—” Oh, this was going to be humiliating. “I was thinking you knew how to take care of your people. Not everyone does.” Then Matthew focused on his beer, though he didn’t want to drink too much. It would be even worse if he were sick all over the table.
There was a silence, then Warren’s voice was very quiet.
“Do my best. Did.” There was a tiny hesitation, as if he were deciding what to say.
“I ended up in research work. Not direct fighting. They don’t like to promote beyond Captain.
And I went to the wrong school to get a promotion into the upper levels of the general intelligence service.
All public school boys, Oxford and Cambridge.
” Something in his tone made it clear he was familiar with the type, used to dealing with them.
Then, carefully, “I’ve looked up your background. You needn’t feel you have to share.”
That, though, was a startling enough statement that Matthew looked up sharply, then his head regretted the sudden movement and shift of focus. “You looked me up?”
“Dreadful habit of the Penelopes, we’re irrepressibly nosy. I try to have manners. I just looked at the public files, nothing else. I think doing more is rude, unless there’s a specific call for it.” Then, almost conspiratorially, “Also, I like the puzzle of figuring some of it out for myself.”
Matthew did not know what to do with that last part, but the earlier bit gave him something to say. “What do you know, then?”
“Schola, of course, Boar House, Four years behind me. Quite a good bohort player. I remember watching you. I’d come back and visit Isembard and Thesan when I could.
I saw your last two matches, actually. I’d have liked to play against you.
Clever play, not just strong.” Matthew felt that was a particular sort of compliment.
“And then an apprenticeship in the Ministry, some work in the Courts, but you chose to focus elsewhere. Logistics posting during the War, and I gathered from what I could access that you handled things well there. Two notes in your records. And then Germany.” Here his voice got careful. “Close enough to something awful.”
Matthew nodded jerkily.
“If you let me know what snuck up on you today, I can keep it off you in future meetings.” That was just said, right out, when Warren did not need to make that sort of offer.
“I was there in the second half of 1945. Different sorts of awful, probably, but enough to have an idea of the range.” He didn’t say it lightly, exactly, but as if he were deliberately skimming just above the surface, not wanting to linger on any of it.
Matthew sucked in a breath. “The Bavarian plants. The gentian. The edelweiss. I didn’t expect...
” But he could smell them, the way the scent had been around.
It curled through the middle of bombed out buildings and Army guards and trucks, and the constant tension of the public court spaces and the prison. “Stupid, really.”
“More common than people admit.” Warren’s voice was firm now. “Just the Bavarian plants, or is there anything else like that?”
Matthew shrugged. “Plants are the easy ones to name.” The rest of it didn’t have patterns he’d been able to figure out reliably.
A tone of voice, sometime, the way a sound echoed in a larger room, the patterns of a form or a set of notes.
People speaking in multiple languages all at once, the way they had different rhythms. It wasn’t the same thing all the time.
Sometimes everything was fine. Some days it wasn’t.
“Glad to help, then. And it’s no bother.” Warren shrugged. “The cider’s excellent. I remembered that from when I was last here.”
Now that presented a different puzzle: whether he was referencing the cider specifically, the way people in the know about this place did.
Or whether, as might be equally likely, he just liked cider.
Matthew certainly couldn’t figure out how to ask.
He sat there for a moment, then there was a movement, just at the edge of his attention.
Warren was immediately at attention, not with formality, but like a cat who’d spotted something that might need to be pounced upon.
Then there was a voice, a comfortable sound. “Matthew, just wanted to say hello.” That was someone Treeve had introduced him to a couple of weeks ago. Warren obviously evaluated the situation, sticking around for a minute or three of conversation, then made his excuses.
“I might have a question for you in a day or two, something about my other work. Mind if I stop by?” Warren made it sound ordinary, and that certainly wasn’t.
Matthew shook his head. Right now, his wits were spinning.
He’d rather try to manage an ordinary conversation with what was his name, Horace.
He could do that as he was now, rather than all the unexpected things Warren kept doing.
Warren took his leave, stopping by the bar for a quick word with York before passing over a couple of coins, certainly enough to cover the meal so far. Then he slipped out between a couple of sets of people coming in, disappearing out the door with no hint of trouble.