When Gascoigne opened the door and saw Henryk on his doorstep, his reaction was not hospitable. In fact, he swore quite loudly, which drew a few glances from passers-by. Gascoigne had been luckier than most, and one of his many blessings was a house in the sort of neighbourhood where someone as rough as a hunter wasn't even really supposed to pass through. Henryk harboured a secret belief that no man in Yharnam looked more out of place on his own front doorstep than his permanently dishevelled partner. Few men seemed to care quite as little as him, too.
"A week, Henryk, you give me a week. We have a deal."
Drunk was probably too strong a word, but he certainly wasn't quite sober. It was fair enough; they did have an agreement, and part of that agreement was allowing each other a certain amount of space. What the man got up to in his own home was really his own business, even at this time in the morning.
"Relax. It's your wife I need." Gascoigne raised an eyebrow. Henryk recalculated. "I need to borrow a few things." The other eyebrow raised, but there was a tiny twitch in the corner of Gascoigne's mouth.
"Henryk! Welcome, dear! Come in, come in."
And the day got better.
Yes, Gascoigne was a lucky man in a lot of ways, and most of them were embodied in Viola. Apart from being staggeringly beautiful, she was whole-heartedly sweet and good-natured. A giant venomous centipede could have knocked on the door and she would have insisted on inviting it in and serving it tea in a china cup. She would probably already know its children's names and genuinely want to know how well they were growing up, too. Besides, Gascoigne was totally incapable of saying no to her, or even suggesting disapproval. It was astonishing how quickly Henryk was in a chair by the fire with a plate of biscuits beside him, slightly uncomfortable as he always was in polite company, but also quite smug at how easy it had been to get inside. He wondered vaguely if there would be sandwiches, and how much it would annoy Gascoigne if he accepted them. It would certainly delight Viola.
He took a sip of tea and ignored his partner completely. "I'm taking an apprentice," he told Viola. "She's at Iosefka's and she doesn't even have her own clothes. I can find her a room somewhere, but I have no idea what else a girl's supposed to have."
Viola smiled. "I can lend her some clothes, a comb and so on, and take her to the right places for the rest. A difficult start, I take it?"
Good gods, her voice was like silk. There was no possibility of telling her the story, so he just nodded, and she nodded in return. "Perhaps she could use a friend, then." She started pouring tea, in pretty china that suited her perfectly.
"Who?" Gascoigne asked suddenly.
Henryk paused, reluctant to voice any detail that might upset the company. "Her," he said eventually. "The one we found."
Gascoigne barked a laugh. "With the glass?"
"Aye, with the glass."
"Mm." He quirked a smile. "Put a bit of muscle on her and she might stand a chance."
"Henryk…" Viola passed him a teacup. "She's young, I take it?" He nodded. "And pretty?" Never having seen her face less than half covered in blood or bandages, he gave a half-shrug. Viola looked uncomfortable. "Give some thought to where you find her a room, won't you? A young lady alone might face some… problems that you never had to face. There are parts of this city… Well."
Once again, the image of shard of glass sticking out of a scourge beast's lifeless eye floated smoothly to the surface of Henryk's mind. He pushed it back down again. Neither red nor black belonged on a morning like this. He had already decided that if he was going to take her on, he ought to set her up, but come to think of it, he hadn't actually thought about where he was going to put her. There were rooms to rent all over the city, but not for the likes of them. Hunting was a respected profession in Yharnam, but strangely, that respect rarely seemed to stretch to the hunters themselves. They were seen as unpredictable, unclean, dangerous even. People would give them cautiously respectful nods, especially right before or after the night of the Hunt, but not let their children talk to them. Some people thought they were cursed, or doomed to madness. Viola's father had hated the idea of her marrying one. Most of the more upper-class establishments refused to let them in the door. There were plenty of landlords in the city who would refuse to rent a room to a hunter. It already ruled out a lot of neighbourhoods.
And then there was the other issue: he had never had an apprentice before. Even Gascoigne, young though he'd been when they first partnered together, had at least been considered fully trained in the country he hailed from. Yes, there had been work to do to there, but it was building on a decent foundation. Maggie had a lot of fight in her, but it was all she had. There was a lot of work to do, which he had very little experience in doing. He'd been a lot younger than her when his training began, and his mentor's methods hadn't been something he intended to repeat.
Well, he would just have to figure it out as he went along. Viola would see to the girl's more practical needs, until she was better able to take care of herself. The League didn't exactly have a system for training new hunters, usually leaving each mentor to his or her own preferred methods, but they had an interest in the next generation of hunters being competent, so those with particular skills were usually willing to share them. Somehow, it would all work, and for once the numbers of the League would go up, not down, as the worrying trend had been in recent years.
Viola was far too polite to tell Henryk that he was sat staring off into space, so she brought his attention back into the room with an offer of sandwiches.