Chapter 1
The boarding house was a sanctuary both for Alice Wilton and her young son Jack, and for the damaged men that came through her doors. Time spent in well-appointed comfort under her protection was a luxury almost beyond the telling of it for lads who had grown up under canvas or in the teeming slums of Birmingham.
'Here's to a week between Alice's sheets,' Tommy's men would roar as they went out to fight their next furious battle. '… and to a night between her thighs!' It was not something that they would ever dare to say to her face, however. For despite their constant flirting and chafing at her she'd never given them any reason to think that she was not exactly what she appeared to be – a chaste and respectable widow in the employ of the Shelby Company.
She was certainly a devoted daughter, they thought, as her regular trips to see her mother demonstrated. It was well known that Alice's mother was so respectable and so fragile that she could never be allowed to come within fifty miles of the boarding house let alone set foot in it. In consequence Alice was obliged to take the train to visit her regularly leaving the dedicated Edie in charge in the boarding house and Jack. No one had ever guessed that those periodic trips away were actually an opportunity for Alice and Tommy to spend time together making up for their enforced separation.
The Peaky Blinders had rapidly taken little Jack under their wing. How could they not? Most of them had known him since he was only a few months old and they all adored his mother. In any case he was a merry and engaging little lad who was always keen to listen to their tall tales or fetch and carry for them. If his intense eyes seemed a little familiar, well who was to say. There was more than one man in Birmingham with pale watchful eyes. In any case, his thick brown curls and sweet smile were all his mother's.
The younger Lee boys showed a particular interest in him as he got older, taking him off for adventures in the woods or up on to the commons where they taught him to catch rabbits and shoot a gun. Charlie had sometimes come along and the two half-brothers had begun an innocent friendship totally unaware of the truth about their relationship. Now, just shy of his 9th birthday, Jack was sitting goggle eyed as one of Tommy's lads gave a graphic account of an illegal boxing match he had taken part in. Looking on watchfully, Alice stifled her concerns. She didn't like it but she knew that one day Jack would enter the Blinders' dangerous world himself. It would do him no good to go in to it ignorant and unprepared. The struggles undergone by Michael Gray when he had first found his way back to his mother offered ample evidence of this. All she could do was protect him until that time.
Her relationship with Tommy was still a source of great joy for Alice, although keeping it secret from the ever inquisitive Jack had rapidly become all but impossible. When she judged him old enough she had told him the partial truth and sworn him to secrecy. Nodding solemnly the little boy had agreed not to say a word, nor had he in the years since. He had clearly taken the Blinders views on narks to heart. That Thomas Shelby was his father remained hidden from him; there was time enough for that when he was grown.
The highlight of their time together was unquestionably the occasional weeks that she and Tommy stole together by the coast. When Jack was two years old Tommy had purchase a house for them in Whitby. The small seaside town was away in Yorkshire, sufficiently far from anyone who might know them that they could live there together openly, in the guise of man and wife. Their visits there were bliss. During the day they would wander arm-in-arm along the prom or explore the Abbey and its grounds, chatting about everything and nothing - free, for a time, from the awful pressures of Tommy's dangerous world. At night they would make love.
Over the years they had taken great delight in learning the intricacies of each other's bodies: that sensitive spot on Alice's neck which made her whimper with pleasure when Tommy nibbled it; or the languid rhythm she would set with her hand which she knew would make Tommy beg for release. In Whitby they were able to indulge themselves to their hearts content.
Occasionally Alice would wake to find Tommy looking at her, searching her face intently for something he could never seem to find. Embarrassed by the intensity of his gaze she would wriggle closer and find a way to distract him. At other times she would catching him staring at her in a way she found almost frightening. It was a look that was by turns puzzled and wary. At first she had tried to find out what was troubling him but he would always brush off her questions with a laugh; eventually she stopped asking.
Tommy could not deny that the opening of the boarding house had been a good idea. The nominally legitimate side of the business made a tidy profit which was more than enough to cover the expenses incurred by any of the Shelby Company men who went to the safe house to recuperate or lay low.
The safe house itself was an extraordinary network of rooms built largely in to the cellars below the main building. It incorporated a number of bedrooms, a treatment room, a large kitchen, a still room, and finally a parlour, where men who were well enough to get out of bed could congregate and take their ease all out of sight of anyone coming or going upstairs.
Tommy loved to visit his men in the hidden rooms beneath the boarding house. He would sit with them for hours relaxing and playing cards. All the while he would subtly watch them interact with Alice. He was fascinated by their behaviour towards her. They were a rough lot but they treated her with an exaggerated courtesy which almost made him laugh out loud, falling over each other to help her lift heavy pots on to the dinner table, fix broken furniture, or set the fires. But if they were gentle in their usual dealings with her they could not contain their essential natures for long and the parlour and kitchen were usually filled with roars of laughter, foul language, outrageous flirting, and a thick fog of smoke. At the centre of it all, Alice fretted, organised, and healed. She controlled her staff and the men in her care like a general on the battlefield. One sharp word from her, a single pointed look, and any bad behaviour would stop instantly. She had plainly been taking lessons from Polly.
Tommy could always tell when Polly and Alice had had their heads together over a piece of business whether it be better wages for the girls in the betting shops, a soldier who needed to be helped to retire, or any other thing that caught their attention. They would approach him independently of one another but their actions and their arguments would be marshalled in a clearly coordinated pincer movement. When they worked together like this, they usually had good reason so he generally took their advice.
Through all of this organised chaos his son Jack romped and played. Tommy watched him with secret pride as he grew: at three he had clambered fearlessly in to the laps of scarred and bruised men who had only days before committed acts of the most extreme violence; at five he had sat quietly learning card tricks and cons from professional card sharps; at seven he had begun to learn to handle a blade. His son was totally relaxed with the men of the Peaky Blinders and in return they treated him like a favourite younger brother. Tommy's only concern was Alice. He could see how hard it was for her to bite her tongue at some of the stories they told her child, to brush off the brutality that was part and parcel of Tommy's daily business, or to resign herself to the dangers of what was to be her son's future.
He loved Alice more than he had thought it would possible to love anyone after Grace. Sometimes he could hardly bear to keep his hands off her. On a few occasions he had taken her over the desk in her office on the ground floor but this had been fraught with danger and had also brought back uncomfortable memories of his times with Lizzy Stark. Now he restrained himself until he could coax her away for a night or two; she deserved better than to be treated as his whore.
The best times were undoubtedly those when he managed to take her away to the house in Whitby. It was restful, he felt, to occasionally pretend that they were a normal couple. However, he knew that it was not true and never could be. Although he tried to put on a good front for Alice, inside there was a constant nagging fear that she would see the truth of what he was and realise how unworthy he was of her. At that point she would surely leave him and take Jack with her. He fretted over it constantly unable to find a moments peace.