A/N: I'm usually to be found over in the Spooks fandom where I'm writing a little thing called Hook, Line and Sinker, but having recently revisited all 3 series of Silk, an idea took hold and wouldn't leave me alone; so here is Chapter 1 of the result. I hope you will enjoy it; reviews, as always, are most welcome.

'How I feel about Miss Costello surpasseth all understanding.' – Billy Lamb

It's all bluff, this job; ducking and diving and playing a blinder to secure my briefs the best cases, the biggest solicitors, the juiciest fees. My old dad had shown me the ropes when I was just a green kid straight from my O-levels in the local comprehensive, the one at the wrong end of Southend-on-Sea. True, I only just scraped through in Maths and Chemistry, but I did all right in P.E., English and History, and what else matters around the Inns of Court? Fast talking, fancy footwork and remembering who did what, and when, to whom, that's what a barrister's clerk needs, along with a pair of balls the size of a bull elephant's, and the hide to match. Man and boy, I've lived and breathed this job; and boy and man, I have loved that girl. Miss Costello. Martha…

Even the wedding band I've worn for more than twenty years isn't real; or, rather, it was once, but now it's just part of the uniform, as much as my three-piece suits or flashy ties (you can take the boy out of Essex, but taking Essex out of the boy, now that's something else entirely…). Most of the time I forget it's even there, until I wonder why some fit-looking bird in the corner of the pub has suddenly stopped giving me the eye; but lately, I've been only too glad of its presence, like a superhero's magic ring that gives me the power of invisibility. The last thing, the absolute last thing I need right now, is to have to explain to some woman that my downstairs is out of order, and not likely to be put right any time soon, even if my upstairs is gagging for it. It's just too humiliating; I'd rather die, first. As well I might.

The ring was my father's, given to me on what turned out to be his deathbed at age forty-nine, only none of us knew it at the time, except him; he always was a great one for thinking ahead, my dad. "You'll need this, lad. It'll keep the skirts away; you don't want to be doing with any of that in Chambers. Barristers are barristers, clerks are clerks, and never the twain, Billy, d'you hear me? Find a nice girl from the typing pool in another set, or a legal secretary, if you're really ambitious, and you'll be set for life." He died a few hours later, and I don't mind saying it was a relief and a mercy to see him out of the nameless, terrible pain that had gripped him so fiercely for a year, leaving him wrung out and grey as an old dishcloth, while the weight fell off him and his bones threatened to break through the fragile, papery skin that was all that held him together, in the end. I was twenty-six, a clerk in Alan Cowdry's old set over at Gray's Inn, and my father had taught me well in the ten years we had worked together.

All he had told me I held to be gospel truth, until Miss Martha Costello came banging into the clerks' room on her first day at Shoe Lane, and walked straight into my heart. She was everything my dad had warned me about: brilliant, beautiful, difficult, but with a burning passion for the law that lit her up from the inside out like a bonfire blazing on Guy Fawkes' Night, and complete conviction in that most glorious of English legal precepts, the presumption of innocence. She was a born defence barrister, a scrappy little blonde from Oop North, and from the minute she barged through the door I was courteously holding open for her, all spiky gelled hair and in a suit that looked as if she had just dragged it out of an Oxfam bin, wearing her black sixteen-holer Docs like a defiant statement of intent, I was, to all intents and purposes, a goner. In a world where money talks and bullshit walks, where appearance and polish is everything, where a man is known, and judged, by the cut of his suits and the reputation of his tailor, Miss Costello was like a bloody great cyclone, not just a breath of fresh air, arriving in Chambers. She was the most genuine article I had ever seen; the air around her seemed to warp and bend as she strode in, fire in her eyes and a string of Mancunian imprecations falling from her lips as she clomped out after realising her mistake.

I had hurried after her, straightening my tie in an uncharacteristically nervous way. 'Miss? Miss, Head of Chambers' rooms are this way,' I had begun, seeing her barrelling down the hallway towards the WC, and she had rounded on me. 'Why're you calling me Miss? You're not much older than me!' I had blinked in surprise. 'It's what I would call any lady barrister, same as the gents are all Sir. Tradition, Miss. There's a lot of it in the Law.' She had nodded, once, and while I was stood there trying to decide if her eyes were more of a sapphire or a cobalt blue, a look of barely contained impatience that I was to come to know very well crossed her face. 'Oh, sorry, Miss. This way, Miss.' I had led her upstairs, and into the presence of our then, as now, Head of Chambers. Mr Alan Cowdry, as true and fine a gentleman lawyer as you'd find if you went looking throughout the entire length and breadth of this sceptred isle. I've been with him since the start of Shoe Lane, and I'll be with him to the end, which is beginning to loom ever closer on the horizon, or so it would seem…but I digress.

Afterwards, she had clattered down the steep staircase in those dreadful boots, poked her head around the door of the clerks' room, and said, 'Want a fag?' I did, as it so happened; as the Head didn't care for smoking in Chambers, I had shown her the place that all the clerks went when in need of a gasper, a sheltered corner under the eaves of the building across the courtyard from Shoe Lane. Dragging on my Silk Cut, I had narrowed my eyes and given her the old once-over, when I thought she wasn't looking: I was wrong. 'Red,' she said, leaning on the railing and exhaling smoke through her nostrils; I had glanced questioningly at her, and she had said again, 'Red. My knickers. They're red, in case you were wondering.' I had just inhaled a lungful of smoke, and like a schoolboy sneaking his first smoke behind the bike shed, I had almost choked at these words, coupled with the most direct gaze I'd ever seen from a woman. 'Not that you're going to get a chance to find out for yourself, of course; it's just that you seemed so intent on ogling my arse, I thought I'd put an end to your speculations, and just tell you.' Her eyes had fairly bored holes through me, and I remember thinking, Blimey, just wait till you cross-examine a hostile witness…a Rottweiler would be tame by comparison.

Coughing and spluttering, and with my face turning a fine shade of scarlet, I had attempted to apologise; but the words wouldn't come, and as first one, then the other, corner of her mouth had twitched upwards into a smile, I had forgotten everything: my apology, my old dad and his gospel truth, all the unwritten rules of clerking, and instead had stuck out my right hand, given her my most charming grin, and said, 'I don't believe we've been properly introduced, Miss. I'm Billy Lamb, and I'll be clerking you.' She had finished her cigarette while considering my outstretched hand, before seizing it in a surprisingly strong, cool grip, and shaking it firmly as she had replied, eyes sparkling with amusement at my boldness, 'Martha Costello, junior barrister, just landed in London and in need of a friend. Will you be my friend, Billy Lamb?' I had beamed back at her. 'Miss Costello, I'm your man.' And from that day to this, I've never spoken a truer word. Clerk, confidante, friend and occasional adversary, I'm her man through and through, in every way but the one that I know will never be, can never be, now. I have known Miss Martha Costello, Queen's Counsel, for nigh on nineteen years, and I have loved her as I have never loved anyone, for each and every one of them.

What I feel for her goes far beyond the power of mere words to explain; it's not that I fancy her (although I do, quite a lot), or that I consider her to be the best defence barrister, QC or not, in London (and she is, hands down), or even that she's utterly staunch in her loyalties, to her clients, her Chambers, and her senior clerk. It's something much purer and far finer than all that. Without being too soppy about it, I'd go so far as to say that I think I'm in love with her soul, that warrior spirit of hers and her unique ability to believe absolutely in whatever case or cause she's fighting for. Martha Costello has integrity in a profession that gets its daily bread by saying one thing and doing another; and street-fighter that I am, deviser of Machiavellian schemes to do right by my barristers and my Chambers though I may be, I will honour and admire and respect and love that girl until I take my last breath. Which may be sooner than I think; certainly it will be far, far sooner than I would like. Such is life, as the famed Australian bushranger, Ned Kelly, was heard to say, just before they hanged him for his crimes.

That's the thing with the situation I now find myself in; in the midst of life, I am dying. Even as I type the words, I can't believe it myself, so why would anyone else? That's why I haven't told anyone except Martha; that, and I couldn't bear the awkward sympathy, the pitying looks, the whispered conversations behind my back. Most of all, I don't want them to know that I'm…less…than I used to be. What a joke, what a cosmic bloody coincidence: me, Billy Lamb, the baddest barrister's clerk in the country, with balls of brass and the dick to match, has about as much get up and go nowadays, as far as manly urges go, as my dear old aunt Ethel, God rest her. Me, whose vitality and energy are the stuff of legend, wilting before the onslaught of yet another hot flush, me, the toughest of the tough, feeling forever on the verge of tears, my eyes hot and prickly, my throat tight, as emotional as a bride left at the altar.

In short, I don't know how women do it, manage, I mean, with all these hormones generating a hundred different feelings every moment of every day. It's a wonder that any of them can see straight, let alone stand up in Court and decimate the prosecution's case with stone cold logic, point by point. I'm not having a go at the fairer sex, either: I think they all deserve bloody medals, now I know a bit about how things are for them. For the first time in my life, foreplay makes sense…or it would, if I were getting any. Which brings me to the crux of the matter: me, and Miss Costello, and heaven help us all.