Though Orla knew service at Farringham, and by extension, its proximity to teenage boys meant encountering any number of ungodly things on the regular—laundry days, in particular, were infamous for their sticky socks—she could tell Martha had adjusted well enough within the past month.
In fact, her roommate had made quite the name for herself amongst the staff. Enough so that their shared room was often populated with the odd maid or footman complaining of ills Martha happily extended her help to mend. Orla helped, too, supplying alcohol and discretion whenever necessary. And though Martha was much better with the scrapes and bruises, Orla could brew a mean cup of mugwort tea for the maids that found themselves in the family way, as was common.
So as to minimize the risk of discovery, Orla would occasionally pick up the slack on Martha's quicker duties while the latter was busy tending to her patients. As such, tidying Mr. Smith's classroom hadn't initially been on Orla's roster for the evening, though she absorbed the task with little complaint.
Mr. Smith was one of the messier teachers, which would've been cause for some irritation if Martha hadn't explained earlier that he insisted, occasionally even with special instructions taped to the door, that the servants not move any of said mess. In this case, Orla appreciated the man's affinity for disaster, since it meant she'd be in and out with a quick dusting at most. But of course, nothing could be so easy.
Just as Orla made to shuffle out of the room, she was impaled by a stack of tomes.
"Goodness! My sincerest apologies, Miss Orla," Mr. Smith exclaimed, scrambling to set the books onto a nearby desk to give her a once over. "Are you alright?"
"Perfectly," she wheezed, not at all surprised that'd he'd made himself inconvenient at the most inopportune moment. Clearing her throat lightly, Orla bobbed into a curtsy. "If ye'll excuse me, sir. I've jus' finished up here. I was covering for Martha."
Mr. Smith furrowed a brow, seriously. "Is she unwell?"
Orla smiled at his concern. "Nae, Matron jus' wanted to borrow her for something or other," Orla lied. Then, to ease his worries, "Anyway, Martha's heartier than hunter's stew. The day Matron sends a sniffly boy home is the day Martha falls ill."
"A fine notion!" He laughed. Then, motioning her back into the room, "I've actually been meaning to give you something," he said absently, hurrying behind his desk to dig through a drawer.
Orla trailed after him with hesitation. She hadn't a clue what Mr. Smith could possibly have for her. She'd spoken hardly a word to him since their encounter in the kitchen a month ago, and though he was handsome enough, she prayed this wasn't some ploy to proposition her.
"Ah!" He startled Orla out of her thoughts, pulling a perfectly yellow banana from his drawer. She hadn't even realized she'd extended her hands to accept the strange gift until he had placed the fruit into her limp palms. Orla eyed the thing at arm's length, as if it were a rat, and Mr. Smith beamed like the cat that had dragged it in.
Upon further examination, the banana seemed just fine. The peel was unbruised, which was more than one could expect from imported produce, and Orla couldn't help but wonder where he'd managed to get one this time of year. There weren't any in the pantry last time she checked, and she definitely knew where to check better than Mr. Smith, if their last interaction was any indication.
"Thank you, sir," she said, though the words came out more like a question.
He preened, moving to the front of the desk where he plunked himself on top of an array of semi-important looking papers. "I thought it was only fair, after you helped me with my own fruit escapades," he said in earnest before hopping back off the desk, deciding to pace the room like a particularly enthused professor instead. "You know, it's rather odd where I found the thing. I hope this doesn't put you off from eating it, mind you, but yesterday I'd been turning out the pockets of one of my coats-I hadn't worn it in a while with the weather warming up-and all sorts of things came flying out. Bells and whistles, and I think maybe a Christmas ornament, but on second thought, it might've been a dog treat. Besides the point, because out falls the banana! I hadn't a clue where it came from, but now that I think about it, I have the strangest feeling someone's told me to bring a banana to a party before," he met her eyes for the first time during his rant and seemed to be shaken from his revelry. "But now that I'm saying this all out loud, I'm beginning to question whether pocket fruit was the proper way for me to repay you…"
His newfound hesitation was more than likely born from the way Orla had yet to cease balking at him nor the banana. But as absurd as the whole thing was, she couldn't help but to feel a keen sense of appreciation. As strange as the gift was, it was the child-like sincerity, like a dog that's just greeted you with adorably nasty-breathed kisses, that lent to the peculiar sort of gratitude kicking in her chest.
She looked up from the banana to meet his eyes with a soft smile. "I suppose I should bring ye an apple next time I find myself in yer company?" She joked.
"Wellllll," he returned playfully, "the Greeks would think you a bit forward, but no, no, I'd prefer if we consider all fruit debts repaid. I feel we've ignored the other food groups terribly."
"The Greeks?" She teased.
"Yes, I'd wager you'd be getting a bit more than you'd bargained for, seeing as the Greeks considered a thrown apple something akin to a marriage proposal in ancient times."
Orla's mouth fell open. "Quite right!" And the two said their goodbyes with a burgeoning sense of amity.
Strange, strange man.
As it was after school hours, and Martha was sure to have another guest or two over in the servant accommodations, Orla thought she might as well pay Ian a visit in his dorms before he got too comfortable with a book and ended up throwing her out entirely.
Despite living in the same building, their schedules never seemed to line up. And as it was Orla's sisterly duty to check up on her baby brother, she usually made the effort to go and see him, but the older he got, the more he seemed to think quite the opposite. Teenage boys could be more trouble than they were worth sometimes.
Reaching the student dormitories, Orla made sure to knock on Ian's door, waiting for his shout of Come in! before she entered armed with her banana and a smile.
"Look what I found!" She sing-songed, waving the fruit for effect. Ian was sprawled out on the bed, shoes still on, though, graciously, hanging off the side and not dirtying the linens. God knew how many times she'd scolded him for making the servants' jobs harder.
Ian peered over his copy of Peter Pan with a disinterested look. "A banana?"
She should've known he'd have Peter Pan out. Orla wondered if he ever got sick of rereading it. It'd been all of two years, about the same time they'd moved into Farringham, since she'd scraped up the money to buy him a copy from a neighbor who'd already finished the book a week after it'd come out. Ian had been 11 then, so though she'd framed it as a "back to school gift," it was more like a distraction from the recent passing of their mother.
And distract it did. Ian spent weeks talking her ear off about which stars led to Neverland and what he'd say to Tinkerbell and how he'd fly the highest of all the boys on the island. Orla thought the story was cute enough, if not a bit severe in its message.
She was glad, anyway, that it had helped her brother as much as it did. Until, that is, Ian mentioned something along the lines of wanting to become the new Peter on his 12th birthday, since he, too, didn't have a mother and would soon enough no longer be a boy. That'd been about the time Orla added "Ian shuts up about Peter Pan," to her nightly prayers.
Orla flopped down on the bed beside him, which was harder than it looked, considering the pair of them were very much all knees and elbows thanks to their lanky father. "Aye, only the most magnificent banana on the planet, and yer gorgeous, amazing, kind, wonderful, beautiful sister has deigned to gift it to ye," she waggled the fruit between his face and the book.
She wondered how he could read with the way his hair insisted on falling into his face, and she made a note to get him to the barber's in town that weekend.
"Did ye say gorgeous and beautiful?" He lifted a brow, but not so much as an eye from the page.
Orla grinned. It meant he'd been paying attention after all. "Well, ye see, I had to cover all my bases."
He huffed. "I don' want yer banana," he said with finality.
"Suit yerself," she grumbled at his ill humor before setting the banana on the bed between them.
Sometimes Orla hated him—wanted to slap her kid brother right upside the head and make him regret ever sharing a birth canal with her. And other times, when she saw him like this, all mop-headed, nose stuck in a book, it reminded her of when they were little, and she would whisper awful horrible stories to him in the evenings hoping he'd have nightmares and come crawling into her bed under the cover of dark, his face hot and sticky against her neck as she tucked his skull under her chin all while chiding him lightly for believing her.
It was the type of love that could sustain itself on wallopings for 'hugs' and savage insults as 'I love yous' when they were kids. And of course they still annoyed each other. They were siblings, after all. But living through the death of both her father and mother had taught Orla something about the importance of the real "I love yous," plain and bold-faced, and not just implied under the cover of dark.
Even still, the words were hard, awkward, and somehow always wrong when leaving Orla's lips. So sometimes, she could get them out. And other times, all Orla had to offer was a banana, Ian his disinterest, and the quiet understanding that one's company was enough.
They sat side by side, Orla content to read over her brother's shoulders. He was a fast reader, even more so for having memorized most of the book by heart. Orla knew this, though having lost herself in the story, didn't quite notice how he'd finish a page, count to 30 in his head, then wait for his sister's tell-tale squirm of impatience before flipping the page. They continued like this for some time, Orla unaware of the way Ian's mind was anywhere but Peter Pan.
"Did Rocastle give it to ye?" He finally said.
Orla blinked up from the text. "Huh?"
"The banana," his eyes bore into the book. "Did the headmaster give it to ye?"
She screwed up her face, trying to make sense of the question. At least half an hour had passed since any mention of the banana. It'd only been her excuse to stop by, nothing of real merit on its own. "What makes ye think that?"
She could tell now his eyes were skimming over the words, retracing lines. His fingers toyed with the corner of a page, turning something over in his mind in the heart-on-sleeve manner he'd had even as a baby. "Nothing," Ian murmured. "Jus' something the other boys were saying."
Orla's heart pounded thickly in her chest. "An' what would that be?"
"Nothing!" He said again, growing irritated. He did that sometimes. Acting like she should drop something that he had made an issue in the first place. Orla flickered between anger and anxiety, not sure whether telling him it was actually Mr. Smith who'd given her the banana would make things better, or just fuel the flames of whatever chinwag the other boys had been telling Ian.
She didn't know what to do. Orla felt her throat closing up, and the longer Ian bore a hole into the book, the hotter her temper grew. Why did he ask if he wasn't even willing to hear her out?
"Ian," she pleaded, trying to get him to look up.
He didn't.
She snatched the book out of his hands in one clean flourish, forcing him to meet her eyes. It shook in her grasp, and not quite knowing how to follow up the outburst, decided to use the book as inspiration rather than the paddle she'd been considering.
"Peter Pan is cruel," she spat.
Confusion flamed through his frustration. "What?"
"When Jane asks Wendy why she canny fly any longer, at the end of the book," she prompted. "What does she say, Ian?"
"Um, that only children can fly – "only the gay and innocent and heartless." He recited without a beat.
"Aye," she said. "It's what children are really like. Mothers like to pretend their wee ones are little angels, but really children are selfish, conceited, and callous."
Orla felt her voice shake with the undercurrents of rage.
"An' what does Michael tell his mother, when he comes back from Neverland?"
"I am glad of you," Ian quoted.
She nodded, trying to find the right words.
"Children can feel 'glad of' plenty of things, Ian, but they don' feel loyal to anything. They hevny learned yet that a loved person can change, or disappear, or die when they aren't looking. An' because the gladness of their love exists wi'out the fear of loss, it makes them all the more ready to abandon. Their heartlessness becomes the result of their innocence, their adult hearts the reward of experience. So when the Darling children realize that the parents they're glad of may one day disappear from their lives…"
Orla swallowed, wondering if Ian remembered their own parents as clearly as she.
Her father, who had a deep, rumbly voice, and a smile to match. He was the reason for their soil brown hair and hazel green eyes. Their awkward limbs and flat feet. Orla remembered him always with a grizzled beard and a trinket secreted away behind his back whenever he'd visit between moments abroad. The last of these gifts had been a Distinguished Service Cross and casket.
Their mother, Maeve, had been pregnant with his third child when he died. Six months later, she'd pushed out the still born, christened it Farlan Alexander MacKenzie the second, believing it to be her spirit husband failing to be reborn to her, and died that night of grief, the bairn still bundled in her arms when the midwife had first discovered she herself had gone cold. It'd all happened so fast. No time to inform the mother it'd been a girl, not a boy, she'd given birth to.
Orla began again. "When they realize their parents are not forever, the Darling children feel a sad ache—an early sign of their adult hearts. But Peter is different. He admits to having felt that ache many times over in his long life. So why disny he grow up, Ian?"
She startled when his hand found hers and squeezed. "He forgets," he said, simply.
"An' his forgetfulness protects him from loss," she finished for him, gripping the offered hand with force. "Children are heartless from inexperience, but it may be that Peter is heartless by choice."
She paused to breathe, knowing what still needed saying. Why any of it mattered.
"So I forgive those boys for whatever they were saying, and I forgive ye for whatever ye were thinking. But I'm no' yer mother, Ian. I'm yer sister. And I want ye to know I will always be here, and I will do whatever it takes to make sure that's true," she met his eyes where they hid under his wild fringe, imploring him to understand. Maybe to forgive, too. "A'm not giving ye the choice of missing me, Ian. Be glad of me or don't, fly away if ye must, but until ye're grown up enough to have the conversation ye were trying to have wi'out being heartless," she stood up to leave, "we won't."
Orla felt his hand fall away limply as she let go. She stood tall as she walked towards the door, hoping that the few tears that had slipped down her cheeks hadn't taken away from her words.
"I am glad of ye," she heard Ian's voice, low and muffled, and she turned to face him on her way out. He smiled sheepishly through a mouthful of banana, the white flesh of the fruit mashed between his teeth and foaming from his lips with the effort to speak.
And Ian's bed was too small to house his sticky-faced sister through the night, so when Orla dragged herself back up to the attic, to the double-bed standing ever-proud at the center of their room, Martha knew her healing hadn't quite ended for the night. Tucking her head under her roommate's chin, Orla replayed Ian's final words to her as she left.
"And I would miss ye."
A/N
So I went back and tried to make Orla's Scottish dialect more obvious in the dialogue. Let me know if it's effective or if it just makes her harder to understand. I know accents in writing can get a bit funky and I don't want to accidentally annoy the fuck out of you guys. Soooo just let me know and I can change it back no problem ;)
(but idk, if it does work, I'd be happy to hear that, too!)
P.S. we'll be getting into some real plot next chapter