Author's Notes:

1) Please to be noting that this is musical canon - movie musical canon, to be precise. Therefore Mr Brownlow is Oliver's biological great-uncle, Fagin and Dodger escaped arrest, and Oliver's complicated family history and related characters are expunged. Several other minor details also place the story firmly in myu-verse.

2) Dickens began producing the first chapters of Oliver Twist in early 1837, before Victoria's ascent to the throne - and in the story itself, Sikes's pursuers demand for a door to be opened 'in the king's name', referring to William IV. I'm saying here that it took place in 1836. This story is set in the spring of 1853; Oliver is 27, and Jack 28.

3) Most OT fics - and the various sequel novels that I call 'official fanfics' - center on Dodger, and it's no surprise why. I really wanted these stories, though, to focus on Oliver as the main character, because I felt that he could grow up to be so much more than 'boring rich toff' - and I ended up being intrigued by his life quite apart from his relationship with Jack. Jack is a very powerful personality, and there had to be a reason for him to love and respect Oliver as he does here; Oliver had to be more than a match for him. Hopefully I at least partially succeeded in that.

-oOo-

The child is a cripple. Oliver remembers some of them growing that way in the workhouse; children deprived of food, of all fresh, clean things, growing twisted like gnarled trees, like some reverse emergence of butterflies. His constitution had somehow been strong enough for his youthful limbs to escape the same fate, but he sees it again sometimes, these afternoons that he gives his time to what in respectable society are termed 'charity cases'. He knows what it is that they need, good air and sunlight, but that's as hard to come by in the bowels of the city as it is for their families to find money for the prescriptions that he writes for the apothecary. Epsom salts to break fevers, acetate of ammonia to purge some of what racks their innards. He tells them to make beef-tea and mutton-tea - although he knows that it's more likely to be broxy than mutton - for the children, to nourish them; the curved bones, the small hunched backs and knobby growths of the joints, as if the miasma around them has slowly seeped through and corrupted them from the inside out.

Oliver washes each time that he returns home, functional and inelegant, shirt sleeves up and half a can of water from the copper in with the carbolic soap in the kitchen sink, but he can't make it leave him, either.

He gives her syrup of squills because she's so small, in cold water; she only manages a few sips and then begins her hacking cough, rattling her tiny frame to the degree that most of the liquid ends up spilt. The cough actually troubles him much less because he knows from experience that there's a possibility that she'll live through it, unlike her other ailments. "I don't want to sleep," she says, when he tucks the blanket in around her chest, "it's not night," then coughs again. The woman, who there seems a possibility of being either mother or sister, frowns slightly, as if it's his fault for allowing it to happen.

"Two teaspoonfuls," Oliver says, "four times a day. And as soon as she's out of bed, open one of these windows and let some fresh air in, for heaven's sakes."

"Our dad'll belt me if we get a chill in the house."

The sister, then. She looks older, in the way that a hard life, not well lived, changes a face; the pretty roundness that should have been present ironed out. If Oliver were less polite, or had been practicing long enough to carry the weight of opinion that it would bestow, he could have simply retorted, I am the doctor, madam, and I advise you to pay me some heed if you want to give any of these children their best chance of survival. Instead, he says, tiredly, "Then please tell him that I'll call again and explain my theories to him."

"He doesn't hold much with doctors. Do more harm than good, he says." Her eyes move back to the child, and the frown returns as she brings her hand to her mouth to chew on a thumbnail. "She has to stay in bed?" she asks.

"For a week."

"But dad takes her up the market with him."

"Is there nobody who can stay with her? Not one of your family? A neighbour?"

She shakes her head, deliberately, as if that's the way for there to be neither.

Oliver touches the back of his hand to the child's forehead, relieved to at least not feel the unnatural heat of fever. He suspects that her presence is as much for the purpose of drawing an extra shilling or two of sympathy from the crowds as it's due to the lack of a caretaker. "I don't want this girl kept out on the street until five in the evening when she ought to be resting."

She folds her arms across her chest. Even here, and like this, there's a pride about her; an awful sort of dignity. "With respects, Doctor, there's not many of us get what we want. Even those ones with lily-white hands like yours, who don't know what it is to do a day's work."

Oliver looks down at his hands, and in his mind's eye, he sees the calluses there once again, feels the sharp slivers of tarred rope pricking their way beneath his nails. The taste of oakum dust fills his throat, and he clears it, reflexively.

"No," he says, after a moment, "no. You're quite right. I don't."

-oOo-

Despite his growing to manhood within its walls, the house in Bloomsbury has never seemed quite like home to Oliver. Rather, the feeling has always tugged at a small part of his mind of having been the guest there of his doting uncle, the permanent resident of a hotel where he has the urge to ask permission before touching the silverware. It's a gentle house that belies Edward Brownlow's bachelor status, full of heavy pots of lush green plants, books to read and always time to discuss them, and a grace that once settled as quietly and welcomingly as a warm blanket over a tired child, and that even business conversation around the drawing room table seems incapable of significantly disturbing.

Into this serene atmosphere a ten year old Oliver had been drawn, enfolded in the assurance that he was now back to stay, the sweet spritely face of his mother, captured for eternity, looking over him from the wall of the girlhood home where she had lived as her uncle's ward. Yet, from time to time, he would still find himself thinking of it as more hers than his own, it seeming more suited to her ways than to those of a boy accustomed to sleeping on hopsacking and pricking his thumbs with sewing needles; those of a parish boy who ran away and walked to London.

And even though seventeen years have stolen away since the last day that he was ever cold, or hungry, or in danger, there's not been another day again when he's been filled in quite the same way with the fear and excitement of walking so precariously the fine line between death and the very fullest experience of life.

His uncle had hoped that he might follow him to the Treasury. Having no natural sons of his own, Oliver knows that it would have been a source of pride for his adopted guardian if Oliver had gone into Whitehall, to perhaps one day inherit his own post. Yet, to his chosen profession, his uncle has nevertheless remained unfailingly supportive, seldom missing an opportunity to slip discreetly into a conversation a mention of my nephew, the physician, so that the foundations of Oliver's reputation are being quietly laid, brick by brick, on a ground made as solid by the respect awarded to Edward Brownlow's name as by his own practice. Some of Oliver's patients can't pay him what they should. He takes what they can afford and never gets round to sending them the real bill for one reason or another. He writes them prescriptions for their weak nerves and aches and pains, then goes home to help Sarah, his housemaid, turn his waiting room of the morning back into the dining room of the evening. He keeps his anatomy books in his small study across the hall in case they worry any of the men, let alone the ladies. He shouldn't be reading any of them, but he's fascinated; he can't stay away.

His appointment this afternoon is less fascinating. The shipping company that Richard Manns owns provides him with the income to pay Oliver as often as he cares to have him make a call, which is frequent, and a great deal more frequent than Oliver would have chosen. Not even the reliable flow of neatly-wrapped sovereigns waiting on the table near the door for Oliver to discreetly collect on his way out, the only correct way for a gentleman to be paid when he cannot according to convention carry out a paid service, feels worth the endless perusals of Manns's recurrent malaises and Oliver's own distaste in being treated as personal physician by a man about whom he likes not one single thing, if his very name had not already been one that he had hoped never to encounter again. Manns's attempts at humour don't mean anything to him, so they don't mean anything to Oliver either. But the lack of change about his eyes when his face otherwise carries a smile means something, and it means something that the maids flinch when he addresses them, as if they're waiting for some real or imagined blow to fall. That a temper lurks only a very little way beneath the righteous and gentlemanly surface, Oliver has little doubt. When he steps across the threshold of Manns's door, the air invariably seems to take on a quality that makes Oliver feel as if he himself might be suddenly and mysteriously ill.

He recently obtained a binaural stethoscope of his own. How much more clearly one can sound out the lungs and hear the rhythms of the heart with the modest instrument, constructed along the lines of a pair of small, flexible ear trumpets, has captured his imagination from the first day, only reinforcing his conviction that the key to diagnosis is observing the body as closely as possible. Oliver's own persistent feeling that there's something not quite nice about it is frustrating, but not as much as the inference of none other than Doctor John Forbes that uncertainty is and ever should be the hallmark of the field of medicine. Manns for his part appears to share the royal physician's view of the use of such apparatus by a doctor as being not a little ludicrous. He smiles, tightly, when the stethoscope is taken out of its tin case.

"Come, Doctor, surely both your sensibilities and mine have both advanced beyond children's playthings? Where is the philosophy and humanity of medicine to be found in such an article?"

"Mr Manns, the stethoscope is more than a plaything. It allows far more efficient detection of any fluids than laying the head on the chest. The fever is gone once more and the cough is much improved for the most part, but this may be the reason for your slight shortness of breath. If fluids have accumulated, the capacity for air in the lungs is reduced."

"That's as may be, Doctor, that's as may be. I wonder, though, how our mutual acquaintance, your good uncle, views your methods of practice? Do not lean on your own understanding, as the Proverbs tell us."

"My uncle respects my work, Mr Manns," Oliver replies. The ire already beginning to rise feels almost ill-suited to him. He presses the chest piece of the stethoscope into the palm of his hand for a brief moment, which might pass for an attempt to make things more comfortable for the patient, but, in truth, is just his own wish to cool his twitching pulse against the ebony wood. "It would be of assistance, sir," he says, "if you were also to remove your shirt. I'd like to listen at several locations on your chest and back."

"Given your unsettling curiosity, sir, I'm certain that you would. However, I shall fight for what little respect I have for as many more years as it's permitted me, before we must all be stripped naked for the physician to conduct an examination of the ear or the nose." Manns's cadence drifts infinitesimally on the words that he emphasizes; a way of flattening 'a's and softening 't's that Oliver can never quite put his finger on, and that always seems to hint at a different sound buried beneath a studiously adopted one. It strikes him as not a little ironic that Manns's pursuit of all things gentlemanly originates from the likelihood of he himself being a made man.

"Lifting the shirt," Manns advises him, as if addressing a small child, "will, I believe you'll find, suffice."

During his years of study, Oliver had learned that no end of body parts can become congested, either with blood or with unpleasant fluids and biles, leading in turn to all manner of complaints, fevers and even handicaps if left untreated. He has, nevertheless, made a profound rejection of bloodletting, it seeming to be impossible to relieve the afflicted organ without weakening the rest of the body. The lungs are easier to drain, with the right medicines. He tells people to fill a basin with hot water first and inhale the steam as it billows up, to loosen them. Today, he's found things quiet, none of the tell-tale rattle, when he gives the instruction to breathe deeply. "It may be nothing more or less than a nervous condition, brought on by your recent physical distress," he says to Manns.

Manns finishes straightening his shirt, and pulls his waistcoat from where it hangs on the back of a chair. "The condition of my nerves, Doctor Brownlow, should come as no great surprise when I no longer feel as though my home is my own - rather that it belongs in part to the villain who calls on me in the night and takes his leave with a good number of pounds worth of my belongings."

"You were robbed, Mr Manns?"

"Indeed. Four times, to date. A lock was picked. I had all changed for Chubb locks, which, I am reliably assured, are unpickable. The next time the shutters of the parlour window were forced. Most recently, entry was made through an attic window, that the wretch evidently accessed by going around to the back of the house through the ginnel and ascending the wall in, what one may only deduce, the manner of a human fly. I am not a man to be made sport of, Doctor Brownlow, and the entering of my house has very quickly become a sport and a game."

Despite knowing that, as an upright member of society, there's nothing that he should find remotely amusing about the situation, Oliver finds himself almost wanting to tip his hat to the resourceful felon. He excuses the impulse with the thought that it's hardly as though Manns cannot afford his losses, before realizing, abruptly, that this is exactly the line of reasoning that he might have followed had he himself carried out the heists. "It may be a spate of bad fortune, sir. You can't be certain that all of the burglaries have been carried out by the same man. News may simply travel from one criminal to another if they can be sure that your premises are worth their while."

"Let me assure you, Doctor, it is most certainly the same man. Shall I tell you how I know?" Manns reaches for the pocket of his coat. Oliver barely has time to identify the small scrap of paper before it's tossed onto the table. "Because following his failure on his last visit to make off with what little I have left, owing to it being secured overnight in my own bedroom, he left his card!"

Oliver raises an eyebrow. "His card?"

"A mockery of one, on the writing desk in my study. Remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ, how that they told you there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts. Jude chapter one, verses seventeen and eighteen, sir."

"May I?" Oliver asks. He slides the card towards him across the polished table, and turns it face up. At top and bottom of the note, a little flourish has been drawn, in the style of a printer's embellishment.

With my utmost disappointment
at not carrying out business with yourself
& wishing to do so once again very soon
Your faithful servant

Oliver frowns vaguely, something familiar striking him about the slope of the script, as if it's something he hasn't happened to see for a long time, but ought to recognise. Then he moves his thumb aside, and, suddenly, there's no mistaking. The author has compounded his errors of penmanship by blotting the ink and then smudging it, but still managed to avoid obscuring his signature. Just a little to the right of the second flourish is a distinctive J.

The boys in the thieves' kitchen run by Fagin had had an edge of a sort over many neighbouring gangs of juveniles, as the elderly Jew had taught all but the very youngest of them at least the rudiments of literacy. Although Oliver and the companions of his own early childhood had been utilized as unpaid labourers as much as they had ever been 'fitted for service', the poor laws had dictated that they be schooled for three hours per day in reading, writing, arithmetic and the principles of the Christian faith. There had often been more of a preference for honing their minds and spirits through hard work than for allowing them to spend the full three hours in the schoolroom, but, nevertheless, Oliver finds it almost impossible to recall a time in his life when he did not know his letters, and it's perhaps the sole legacy that he's grateful for. He had been delighted in his innocence that Fagin's boys could, for the most part, read and write, although he had quickly discovered that their tastes rarely extended beyond the Newgate Calendar and the most thrilling and grisly of the penny dreadfuls.

Jack's most prized acquirement, however, had been several copies of Bentley's Miscellany containing a serial by Mr Ainsworth of the exploits - some real, and some imaginary - of the notorious thief of old, Jack Sheppard. He had not been above circulating the volumes for the other boys' education, but had gone to the trouble of inscribing each cover with his name. It seemed that they always found their way back to him after a time, albeit slightly grubbier. The Artful Dodger had been Fagin's second-in-command, so to speak, and although he was not the eldest, his station had still awarded him some degree of respect.

Oliver can still see the enraptured gleam that had been in Jack's eyes as he read aloud from the papers in the flickering, dancing light of the candle-stub stuck in its saucer of grease beside the bed. "Look after him, Dodger," Fagin had said, when he had put Oliver to bed, and Jack had carried his pillow and blanket over and creaked his way in beside him. Sikes's shadow seemed to have left the room darker, but Jack's face had been bright, and Oliver's shivering had gradually stopped as he listened, with an intrigue tempered only very slightly by horror, to Jack stumbling a little over tales of Sheppard's bold crimes and even bolder escapes. There had been illustrations on a few of the pages. Jack had pointed them out to Oliver with quick fingers.

"Caught four times, he was. They had him in Newgate, clapped in handcuffs, irons and chains, and he escaped. Tied the bed linens together and climbed out of the window with the dollymop what was in with him."

Oliver had been unsure as to the identity of a 'dollymop', but decided to pursue the even more confusing of the two matters. "But how did he free himself? From the chains and - what else was there?"

Jack had rolled his eyes a bit at that. "Picked the locks, didn't he, with a nail. See, he was what they call a screwsman." He sniffed, nonchalantly. "Done a couple of my own, as it happens."

"Doors?" Oliver whispered, fascinated despite himself, but half-afraid of what he might hear.

"Nah. I ain't been out with him much since I grew a bit. Old Bill." Jack fidgeted a little, clearly still disturbed about the evening's events. "He always wants snakes. Like what you are. Jewel boxes, I done - that sort of thing. Nice swag what Fagin don't want breaking." He elbowed Oliver underneath the blanket. "You stay here, and you can have a go, and all."

Oliver shook his head. "I have to go back to Mr Brownlow. He'll think I stole his books and money. I have to," he repeated, quietly.

Jack shot him a look, his expression unreadable for a moment. "Did you peach on us to that toff or didn't you?"

"I didn't! I told the truth!"

"Then you stick with me," said Jack, and a sudden grin flitted across his face, "and I'll do you all right. Teach you everything I know." Leaning in more closely, he tapped the paper. "I'm going to be like him, ain't I? Jack Sheppard. Dress in fine suits like a gent with rings on my fingers, and have the Queen's jewels out of the Tower if I want 'em, and there ain't going to be a prison in London what'll detain me." And he had folded the dog-eared volume and lain there for a time, gazing at the cover with its black-inked signum, the capital letter of which would not notably deviate on any occasion that it was seen over the passing of the years.

Being unexpectedly presented with it again after an immeasurable amount of time causes the same peculiar mixture of feelings somewhere inside Oliver as chance encounters with Jack himself. Two parts are probably frustration, three exasperation, two amusement, and three -? A tangible warmth, one that runs beyond the habits of childhood attachments. Oliver suddenly finds it difficult to keep his voice even.

"Have you reported the incidents to the police?"

"I have not - and nor do I intend to trouble myself doing so. What would be the worth of it when Sir Robert Peel draws his forces from the very same drunken, thieving underbelly of London that he instructs them to control? How they go about on first name terms with urchins and criminals is common knowledge to every man, and doubtless it suits them very well to look in the opposite direction in exchange for a guinea or two. No, Doctor, an Englishman's home is his castle, as they say, and as an Englishman, I shall personally defend my stronghold to the best of my finances and ingenuity."

Oliver's put in mind of the viscount who was said to have ordered his coachman to run down a policeman in the street. It's not an uncommon sentiment, among wealthy and poor alike. Most of the pickpockets and housebreakers in the city have more friends than enemies, and just for one, brief, moment, he's perversely thankful for it. He begins to repack the remainder of his equipment. "I wish you luck in apprehending your thief, Mr Manns."

A smile curls the ends of Manns's mouth. Like most defined expressions, it seems to rest with discomfort on his face. "My goodness, Doctor, no. Luck won't be needed. I mean to entrap him by playing to his greed."

Oliver hesitates in his task. "You'll forgive me, sir, for being interested in your methods," he says.

"I thought that you might be." Manns crosses the room and rings the downstairs bell, before returning to a chair beside the window. He indicates the seat opposite. "Please."

Placing his bag beside the table leg, Oliver follows, and settles himself, trying to find a position in which he can avoid an overly-starched antimacassar that scratches his collar in an unpleasant way. After a short time, one of the maids brings in a tray with a teapot, and scurries out again just as quickly. Manns shakes out a handkerchief, wraps it around the pot handle, and pours two cups. For such a large house, the rooms always seem remarkably quiet; not the same calm that pervades his uncle's home, but in the sense that Oliver always imagines that at any moment there might be a loud and sudden scream.

"Sugar? No?" Manns shrugs a little, and drops two pieces into his own tea with the tongs. "A person acquires the habit, I suppose. Like snuff, although undoubtedly cleaner." He stirs it. "Do you fancy yourself as a thief-taker, Doctor?"

"Only a concerned citizen."

"Very good, then." Manns takes a sip of tea. "As you correctly observe, news travels fast from the mouth of one felon to another. I intend to have the word put about on the streets, by men in my employment, that I shall have a considerable sum of money - government bonds, perhaps - under my roof on a particular night, awaiting transfer the following morning. Our gentleman friend will without question be unable to resist the prospect of fresh pickings." He pauses, apparently for the effect. "But this time, I and several able-bodied men posted throughout the house shall be waiting for him."

A unease begins to crawl through Oliver that seems almost disproportionate to the other man's words. Jack, he feels certain, is well accustomed to living up to his old nickname and dodging capture and arrest on an almost daily basis, and, given Oliver's knowledge of his nature, probably relishes it more of the time than not. His senses, though, seem to be alerting him to a troubling wrongness about this entire situation. "And then, sir?"

Manns glances up. "Then? Then, sir, he will hang."

"Housebreaking and burglary haven't been punishable by death since I myself was a child, Mr Manns. No judge or magistrate would pass the sentence."

"Doubtlessly. But this is of no great concern to me, since I have no intention of taking him to trial. I shall be taking care of the matter myself, and I consider it unlikely that the law will be any the wiser about the removal of one rat from the streets, or mourn the fact if it were. I shall be his salvation, by liberating him from this life of larceny and evil."

Oliver meets his gaze. The anger that had risen up in such a lively way before now feels like slowly congealing iron in his veins. It's paralyzing, leaving him almost literally unable to react, to move, to breathe deeply. "The Bible says thou shalt not kill, sir," he says, very steadily.

"It also says, Whatsoever a man soweth, that he shall also reap. Galatians chapter six, verses seven to eight. And I, Doctor, say amen."

"Amen," Oliver repeats. Slowly, he lifts his cup.

When he remembers, later, he thinks that it was at that moment, without logic or plans as it was, that he took his first step out on the journey that anyone with honesty or sense would have told him that he was a fool to attempt.