Thomas and Jimmy were in habit of reading to each other in the evenings. It had started after the fight, when Thomas' head hurt if he focused on a page for too long and Jimmy had offered to read aloud to him, but they had kept it up for years.

Sometimes it was the newspaper, other times a sci-fi (mostly for Jimmy) or a mystery (mostly for Thomas). Sometimes the other servants would listen in, but on about half of the nights they would sit at one end of the table alone and travel to another place and time through the words they spoke.

Thomas' favourite part of this arrangement was not the story; it was not listening to Jimmy's voice; it was not even that it meant he could watch Jimmy for long periods without it being odd (and usually without Jimmy even noticing). Thomas' favourite part was that when the throat of the person reading became sore, they switched over, and they would have a quick discussion about the book. He adored these talks; finding out Jimmy's perspective on a particular character, laughing over the least likely course of action in one of the stories, or trying to predict the solution of a mystery.

One day, in the midst of a perfectly ordinary paragraph, Jimmy stopped reading and said: "Do you think Mr Holmes and Dr Watson were in love?"

Thomas, who had been leaning back in his chair staring at the ceiling as he listened, looked at Jimmy sharply. "Who with?" he asked, though he knew exactly what Jimmy meant.

Jimmy looked rather as though he regretted speaking; he looked down at his hands and shifted in his chair. "Each other, o' course."

"What makes you say that?" Thomas asked cautiously, glancing down the big table to check that the Bates were still deep in conversation and Alfred was bickering cheerfully with Ivy and Daisy over some undoubtedly trivial matter. The important thing was, no one was paying them the slightest bit of attention.

"It's what some people think, isn't it? Because they were living together so long, an' all. Even though Doctor Watson got married. You can see they care about each other a lot," Jimmy added, tilting the book to indicate where he had concluded this from. "And people say they were only... you know..." He began to go very red in the face. "Only using the one bedroom," he said in a low voice.

Thomas was not sure whether to laugh or just go upstairs, pull his blanket over his head and refuse to come out for two or three weeks. He settled for pressing his lips together. Why was he having this conversation? "Where did you hear that?" he asked.

Jimmy shrugged. "S'just what people say, isn't it? I heard someone on the bus the other day saying Mr Conan-Doyle was half a paragraph away from blasphemy."

Thomas had to smile at that. (If he did not, he might pull out every hair on his head. But at least, he thought, that meant it was not only his sort who saw the potential.)

"So what do you think?" Jimmy persisted, who seemed determined to get an answer out of him now that he had gone to the trouble of bringing it up.

Thomas drilled his fingers on his knee for a moment. Truthfully, he had not put too much thought into the question. He had been looking for love in the vast spaces between words ever since he was a child, and he was tired of it. "What do you think?" he asked, partly to buy himself time and partly out of genuine curiosity.

"That's cheating," Jimmy said, but he was smiling.

"I'll answer when you do," Thomas countered, and pulled the book out of Jimmy's hands to punctuate the point, flicking through as though he was ready to resume reading.

"Yeah," Jimmy blurted out. "I think they are. Now will you tell me what you think?"

Thomas stared down at the book in his hands, trying to hide his surprise. He had expected Jimmy to say something like 'nah, it's a load of tommyrot. They're just friends, that's all'. Not that there was anything 'just' about friends, Thomas thought. Friends could be magical.

"I do think they love each other a lot," Thomas said at last. "They're friends, they share their lives, they talk about important things and try to make each other happy. I don't think it matters if they're in love or not. They just love each other."

Jimmy grinned and ducked his head. "That's good enough, I suppose."