Chapter Text
Arrow House is silent as the grave.
The quiet rings and echoes through the halls: past the portraits—cold, somber, breathless—on the damask walls. It lingers in the doorway of the nursery, brushes cold fingers over his desk, walks on hushed footfalls up the stairs; creaking only once on the topmost step. In the moonlight, it watches him sleep, casting no shadow on the floor. Outside, it is beginning to snow.
The house buzzes with silence. It is almost deafening.
Thomas Shelby starts awake. An empty bottle of Irish whisky tumbles to the ground.
The silence is shattered, and retreats.
XXX
It is evening again and Tommy Shelby sits on the low-slung couch in the parlor. The glow of the electric lights sparkles against the tumbler of whisky held loosely in his fingers. Turns it to gold like her hair used to be. If he closes his eyes and leans his head back, he can hear her singing.
In a neat little town they call Belfast…apprenticed at trade I was bound…and many an hour’s sweet happiness…I spent in that neat little town…
If he reaches out, he can touch her. He can feel the tears on her face. Her breath in his ear.
He is drunk, of course.
He is drunk and his heart is already broken.
The singing goes on, anyway.
XXX
The Russian girl stands in the moonlight wearing nothing but diamonds and a bedsheet. The portrait behind her does not smile kindly. Tommy Shelby looks up at them both. His eyes are unfocused, seeing something else. Perhaps it is the gun in Tatiana’s right hand. Perhaps not.
The moonlight might reveal another figure—slender, golden, hard of heart. But the moon languishes behind heavy clouds.
The Russian girl is cold. But this is nothing new for her. She has been cold before. She twists her neck uncomfortably, even as she smiles like a wolf. It is the diamond necklace that chokes her, sending goose pimples up and down her pale skin. Of course it is the diamonds. Cold and sparkling. They almost feel like fingers…almost…
She laughs and turns to run upstairs, knowing Tommy will follow.
He does.
The clouds part.
Something like a woman lingers on the staircase, hands clenched into fists.
XXX
Cold morning light wakens them both. The baby clutches his father’s fingers. Tommy rolls onto his side, blindly reaching for her. The place where she used to lay is warm.
But there is no one there.
Outside, the blackbirds sing.
XXX
When Charlie is taken, the windows keep banging open. Those who stay behind run from sash to sash, pulling them closed against the screaming wind. Little Karl makes a game of it, guessing which will pop open next. Sometimes doors slam.
“Just the wind,” Ada tells them all matter-of-factly. “All the money in the world and even Tommy can’t keep a draft out of an old house.”
Polly just nods and lights a cigarillo.
But when Ada leaves with Karl to pull the front doors closed, Polly Gray turns to the empty room and whispers to no one.
“He’s going to bring your child back. Be patient. You must try to be patient.”
The wind continues to shriek around the grounds of Arrow House, but the doors stay closed after that. The windows too.
For a little while.
XXX
Her room does not change. Not ever.
Her hairbrush still sits at the vanity; fine yellow hairs snarled in its teeth. The dresses in her closet whisper to one another as they hang in perpetual disuse. Her perfume, her jewelry, her gun in the cedar chest. They all sit and gather dust.
But sometimes…
Sometimes, Tommy thinks the dresses hang in different places. Sometimes the photograph of her father sits on the other side of her writing desk. Sometimes the pistol is hidden beneath different sweaters in different drawers. Sometimes there are disturbances in the collecting grime of the woodwork.
But he never stays in her room for long. He cannot look without tears coming to cloud his vision. And anyway, he has never believed in what he cannot see.
It is easy for him to believe that he misremembers.
He closes the door and the white curtains flutter.
A vase falls and breaks into a thousand tiny pieces.
XXX
He cannot pinpoint the exact moment when it became clear that he was not alone. It was some time after the police were gone and the house was left voiceless save for the nighttime sounds of creaks and shadows and tree branches cracking against windowpanes.
It is storming. The black sky heaves buckets of rain upon the earth just as it did the first time he spoke to her. Really spoke to her.
In a neat little town they call Belfast…
Outside, thunder seems to split the world in half. He starts from sleep. Something with eyes watches him as he tries to shake the nightmare from his skin.
“Grace…” he whispers.
The shadow at the foot of his bed smiles.
“Don’t leave me.”
A voiceless whisper answers. Never...
He is soon asleep again, dreamless and at peace.
The shadow stays until the sunlight drives it from existence.
XXX
He talks to her now.
“Look at our Charlie, Grace my girl. Look how tall he’s grown.”
“Ada sends her love from New York. She’s the only one these days, sending love. Not that it much matters.”
“I know you’ve told me…no guns in the ‘ouse, but business is business, Grace. Besides, that’s a rule you broke yourself.”
“Remember the first time we danced, Grace? You in your red dress and your gun in your purse. You were so beautiful, I couldn’t look away. Couldn’t stop fucking smiling.”
The silence eats his words up. They are never returned to him.
But out of the corner of his eye, there is a rustling as of stiff skirts, the cold click of heeled shoes against hard wood. When he is lucky, he catches the ghost of her laugh—sharp and merry and just a little bit mean.
“Remember that, Grace? Remember everything we did?”
There is no answer, but the silence remembers everything.
XXX
He fucks his way through half of London, searching for her face.
With his eyes closed and near to swimming in gin, he can trick himself into feeling her fine hair brushing his jawline, her skin beneath his fingers; though there is no bullet scarring just beneath the collarbone.
Sometimes her name is pulled from him, and some unseen thing thrums like a heartbeat.
Some girls—the ones that do this for a living—pay no mind at all. They are happy to be someone else for him so long as he pays them well.
He always does.
Lizzie Stark minds, though she never says.
And she never keeps his money.
XXX
Of a summer night, the tall grey in the stables of Arrow House paws restlessly in her stall. She puts her velvet nose out to greet someone. A breeze sends sweet-smelling hay whirling across the brick yard. The horse whickers, her ears pricked.
The moon glances across the brass nameplate above the grey’s stall.
Grace’s Secret.
XXX
Unlike his father, Charlie Shelby sleeps soundly through the night. He sleeps with all the seriousness of youth—as if it is a task set down to him by heaven.
Only now and then does he call out for her.
There is only ever silence to answer his slumbering cries.
But Charlie Shelby wakes every morning with the echoes of Irish songs still ringing in his ears, and he grins at her photograph on the wall.
“Morning, Mummy.”
His father does not ask where Charlie has learned the words to the tunes he hums as he plays on his hands and knees, or runs to the kitchen to ask for a sweetie.
The photograph in Charlie’s nursery does not smile. Not quite.
Not yet.
XXX
He carries her gun in his breast pocket.
It is too small for him. It was not made for his hand, but he likes the feel of it against his heart. He likes knowing a part of her is with him. He likes holding something her hands have also held—his finger on the trigger that hers had also touched.
Sometimes he runs his fingers over the puckered scar on his chest; the one left by the bullet that Danny Whizbang couldn’t stop. He thinks about the scar that surely trails across her skin. The one that is hidden under the ground and the cold weight of midwinter snow.
“Fancy that, Grace,” he mumbles not to himself but to whatever might be listening. “We might have had a matched set.”
And the scar aches dully, as if calling out to its twin.
To the other half of itself.
XXX
In the kitchen on Christmas Eve, he feels her hands on his. Everything is so red. Red like the dress she wore when he danced with her in front of Billy Kimber and realized he wanted her in a way he’d wanted nothing since the war. She’d brought something green and good to life in him, and he wanted to keep it. Well, there is nothing good and green in him now.
The Italian chokes and sputters, hemorrhaging blood. It is everywhere. He cannot see for the redness.
And there, her fingers against his.
Steady, Thomas…whispered in his ear. This is my revenge too.
They pull the trigger together.
XXX
As they walk out the front door into the night, something that might be the wind and yet again might not seems to tug on the tail of Tommy Shelby’s long black coat.
Stay…stay…stay…
The cold air whispers to him, kissing his pale face with frost on its lips. His breath hangs in the air. Hers too. The pale ghost of breath.
Charlie clings tightly to his father. He waves sleepily to Arrow House and all who dwell within.
Tommy’s fingers brush against the cold frame of her photograph in his pocket.
Before he folds himself into the car, he turns to look back at the house.
“Come with me.”
She does.
XXX
She will haunt him for the rest of his life.
END