There was always a loosened bale of straw in one corner of the Montague garage. Sid claimed that he used the stuff to help clean up after he changed one fluid or another in the several vehicles Lady F. kept. He did use it for that, a bit, but it was far handier as a comfy spot for a nap. This wasn't to say that he shirked his duty as Her Ladyship's chauffeur; he simply chose to take full advantage of any and every perk his job happened to offer up.
No one who laid eyes on him as he crawled into his nest tonight would dare accuse him of neglecting his obligations. Sid knew that, but the knowledge wasn't enough to quell his guilt over taking a rest. He needed to get up, get the car started, and get back to the ruins of the conservatory. How he was going to drive through the sheets of fresh hail he'd just dragged himself out of was a mystery that would have stumped even Father Brown, but there was no other choice. This was the plan, his plan, and Lady F. and Mrs. M. were both waiting under a table in the middle of the storm of the century for him to make it work. He had to pull it off, and that's all there was to it.
At the moment, though, he was bloody freezing. The garage wasn't tied into the house's central heating, but there was an old oil stove in the corner furthest from his hay bed. It was tempting. No, no, it was stupid. He needed to warm up a little, yeah, because his fingers were sore, icy claws and probably couldn't have managed a gear shift, but the stove would be too much. It would be impossible to go back out into the cold if the stove was going.
He'd known the way to the garage from the conservatory, just like he'd said he did. Sid knew the quickest way to the garage from anywhere on the estate. Almost as soon as he'd been hired, he'd started secretly studying every possible foot route, timing them, practicing them. It wasn't that he took pride in his job, per se, but rather that he wanted to do right by Lady F. She was the best, and if she asked for the car then he was going to get it to her as fast as possible. Faster, at least, than any of her fancy friends could boast of having their vehicles brought up.
His speed tonight had been cut down by the hail. It blanketed the new spring grass thickly, and Sid had had to mince his way across the lawns. Taking care – and he had tried to take care, because every time he slipped and fell onto the still-sharp ice the memory of that single tear on Lady F.'s cheek assailed him – took forever. He'd wanted to cheer when he could finally make out the shape of the garage, but his teeth had been chattering too hard. Instead he'd reminded himself that both of his ankles were already twisted, so he wasn't technically being reckless if he sped up just a little bit here at the end.
He hadn't fallen again until he was a bare twenty feet shy of the garage door. It was a spectacular tumble, though, and for a moment Sid had stayed down on the cold ground, sprawled out and dazed. Only when a tendril of blood ran into his left eye had he realized that this time it wasn't the hail under his feet that had brought him down, but the stuff that was once again falling from overhead.
Clawing his way across that last little distance was a memory that he sincerely hoped the still-dripping gash at his temple would wipe from existence before all was said and done. He'd tried to keep his head protected as he crawled, and the backs of his hands were stinging from all the wallops they'd absorbed. He was never, he decided, leaving his driving gloves behind in the car again. They weren't thick, but they might have helped a little, with the cold if nothing else. He probably wouldn't even be able to stand putting them on now.
He regretted not waiting an extra week to switch from his winter-weight uniform to the summer version, too, as the thicker wool would have provided more cushion. His knees and elbows burned as if he'd taken coarse-grained sandpaper to them. It felt as if every square inch of his body had caught at least one blow, and he'd taken especially hard knocks in several places. If the aches that were already plaguing him were any indication, he was going to be completely useless for days once he got back to a human temperature.
When his hands began to warm, Sid explored the worst spots. He gingerly fingered his split temple, one shoulder, a couple of ribs, the small of his back. It was hard to tell if anything in particular was broken when everything hurt, but nothing he poked made him scream or pass out. That being the case, there was no reason for him to stay here and let his innumerable scratches keep reddening the straw. On the contrary, he had two very excellent reasons to get up off his arse and get to work. Groaning curses that would have gotten him swatted away from Mrs. M.'s baked goods for the next month had she been around to hear them, Sid forced himself to his feet.
If nothing else, he thought as he gathered a few things together and tucked them into the back seat, at least the noise wasn't the same as it had been before. The hail was rattling off the garage's metal roof in a rhythmless clatter, but it wouldn't set off another flashback. He'd heard rain, even hail – much, much smaller hail – hit this exact roof so many times before that he usually didn't even have to consciously focus to keep acting normal in a storm.
The predictable soundscape of Kembleford was one of the main reasons why he'd come back to the country after trying to live in the city again during his late teens. Tonight's incident in the conservatory was the first time he'd lost control since he'd come home. It had been the specific combination of the whistling of the ice chunks, the explosion-y clatter they'd caused as they burst through Lady Felicia's pottery, and the trembling that the force of their impact had caused in the earth that had done it, or at least that was what he thought. He'd been yanked backward in time by that chorus of doom, back into the long nights he'd spent in crap East London basements, just a little boy cowering with his arms crossed over his head like his mother had shown him how to do. Too bad she'd forgotten her own advice at the exact moment when Sid had looked up to her for reassurance and a ceiling beam had crashed down on her skull.
But oh, hell, thinking about earlier, and about earlier still, was pushing him back towards the edge. Now he could almost detect a little whistle coming from outside, and there was a bit of shimmy in the earth, too, wasn't there? No; no, that was the memory, not reality. Sid closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the cool hide of the Rolls Royce. "Focus, Carter," he muttered to himself. That was what Father Brown had always told him, on later nights when the only bombs and beams falling were the ones in his mind. Focus, focus and breathe. "You can't lose it now. You can't. They're waiting."
Them. That helped. He'd been out of himself when the two women had surrounded him, back there under the worktable, but once the too-immersive film in his head had finally stopped rolling he'd realized what was going on. Part of him had wanted to clear his throat, straighten up, and pretend that he was fine right away. After all, he wasn't a baby. But that was what the Inspector would probably do if he was the one who'd been caught curled up in terror and sobbing his eyes out. Stiff upper lip, button up Buttercup, and all that. Sod the Inspector. Maybe it wasn't very masculine, but it had felt nice to be so unreservedly cared for, so openly loved. Scary nice. Much nicer, Sid suspected, than a cheeky sneakthief like him had any right to feel. And frankly, in that moment he'd needed the reminder that the world wasn't all darkness and pain.
So he'd let himself be coddled and comforted, just for a minute or two, before he turned the macho back on. If Lady F. and Mrs. M. had noticed his failure to pull away the instant he regained control of himself, neither had mentioned it. For that, Sid mused as he blew out a long, slow breath, as for so many other things, he owed them both.
"Got the car, Your Ladyship," he told the empty garage as he pulled himself into the driver's seat with a grimace. "Now for the hurrying back bit."
It was a hundred times worse than he'd thought it might be.
Sid had hoped that the road would be easier to traverse than the lawn had been. His walk had been complicated by subtle slopes beneath the grass that let some of the hail slide down to collect in piles. These piles had been nearly impossible to scramble over, and the clearer spots left above them made it hard to fall into a single pattern of walking and stick to it. The service road that linked the garage to the rest of the estate was graded, however, and the chunks that had hit it had stayed put.
He'd thought this would be better, but the projectiles from the first bout of hail seemed to have cratered themselves into the gravel. This gave them stability, and when the second wave fell it was captured and locked into place by these earlier arrivals. The result was a near-continuous sheet of the roughest ice that Sid had ever seen.
Rolls Royces weren't meant to be driven on knobbly skating rinks. Even moving at a crawl, Sid expected to hear a tyre blow out at any second. The only silver lining was that he would actually be able to hear it go, since the storm had died down again as he was pulling out of the garage. There were a few new dents in the bonnet, but he thought he'd be able to get them out himself and save Lady F. the shop bill. She was going to have enough to pay for between the conservatory's destruction and whatever damage might have been done to the house.
Sid's brow furrowed. The house. There were huge windows in the south drawing room. A numpty might take odds on their holding up better than the conservatory walls had, but Sid wasn't that stupid. Father Brown hadn't been sitting right next to the glass when the rest of them had left him to doze off in the sun, but it was hard to guess what a safe distance might be. Would the first peal of thunder, Sid wondered, have woken him and warned him to move away before he got hurt?
He almost wished he'd stayed behind with the Father today, like he would have done on most any other occasion. But then what would have become of Lady F. and Mrs. M.? It was probably best that the restlessness he'd felt before the storm had driven him to go with them. Neither of them had seemed to feel any foreboding at all until right before he shoved them under the worktable. They might have waltzed right out into the start of it, or at least failed to take cover fast enough.
There was the rest of the staff to consider, too. Sid was technically an employee of the Montagues, but the closeness with which he interacted with Lady F. placed him on strange middle ground downstairs. The housemaids, who came and went on a regular basis and thus never had a chance to figure out quite where he stood in the hierarchy, didn't tend to warm to him beyond friendly flirting. There were no permanent footmen; Lady F. preferred to just hire in male serving staff when she needed them for parties, and in a pinch Sid could do a decent job with trays and decanters. The long-term members of the household – the butler, Warbelow, the housekeeper, Mrs. Lacey, and the cook, Mrs. Young – understood his position well, however, and he had good relationships with all of them. He could only hope that they'd been somewhere safe when the hail had started to fall.
His brooding would have gone on had he not hit a particularly bad patch of road. The Rolls suddenly juddered sideways and threatened to dive into the ditch. Sid wrestled with the wheel, throwing his full body weight into his effort to stay on the right path. His battered shoulder protested, and for one absurd moment he found himself worrying about his cricket future. "...Cricket," he scoffed when things were somewhat calmer. He wasn't going to have to worry about his ability to bowl if he rolled the car over on this ice and got himself killed.
The real excitement began when he reached the first incline. It was gentle and short, but it still took three attempts to top it. Backing the car up to make the second and third tries left Sid sweating despite the cold. Things were bad enough when he could see where he was going. With no light source at the rear of the car – they really ought to have a law about that, thought Sid, though he could hardly believe he was thinking such a thought – his reverse trajectory was invisible. When the back end decided to slide, which it did more or less constantly, all he could do was hold on and wait to see if his luck held.
As soon as he reached the crest, he stopped the car. "Fuck me," he panted, and buried his face in his numb hands. At this rate he wasn't sure he could even make it to the conservatory. If the Rolls didn't give out, his heart would.
He had to turn onto the main driveway and away from the house, then onto the narrow track that swept around the conservatory's low rise and up to the rear of the building. His work got no easier as he went. First, he was so busy struggling not to fall off the road that he nearly missed both turns. Next came the agonizingly slow ascent of the hill. The tires spun uselessly again and again, forcing him into more perilous reversals. On some sections he gained mere inches at a time. And every inch he gained, Sid knew, was one he would have to give back soon, but with gravity dictating his acceleration and with two other people's lives in his hands.
Despite his awareness of what was yet to come, all of his tension evaporated when the headlights finally splashed across the ruins at the top of the ridge. Two figures stood waiting just outside the conservatory's ragged footprint, pressed together for warmth but not so frozen that they couldn't wave wildly as he slid to a halt. The tyres had barely come to rest when Sid staggered from the vehicle. "V'you lost your minds?" he exclaimed, half-appalled, half-giddy. "Out here with no cover? You know it's come back once already!"
Lady F. was in his arms, having outpaced Mrs. M. by a few steps despite the conditions underfoot. "We heard you coming up the hill, and we took the chance. But it doesn't matter now," she said as she squeezed him tightly. Too tightly, really, for the state of his ribs, but Sid swallowed his yelp of pain. "Now we'll all be under cover, together."
"And back to the house and the Father soon enough," Mrs. M. declared. Her expression was one of pure drive as she closed the last of the distance between them. For a moment Sid thought that she was going to elbow the other woman out of the way to claim her own embrace. Lady F. released him before violence broke out, but she hovered at his side while he greeted Mrs. M. "And what," that redoubtable matron demanded after her grip had left Sid short of breath for the second time in the space of a minute, "have you done to the side of your head?"
"I was about to ask the same question," said Lady F.
Sid opened his mouth to reply, but Mrs. M. had hold of his chin and was turning his face away as she tried to examine him. "I need more light," she complained. "I can see blood there, but I can't make out anything else."
"We could move up, more into the beam of the headlamps," Lady F. suggested.
"It's fine," Sid insisted. "It's just a nick." If the mark left by the bit of hail that had floored him looked half as bad as it felt, both Lady F. and Mrs. M. would probably try and insist on some kind of first aid. They didn't have time for that.
"Sidney," said Mrs. M., "you are bleeding."
"Well, so are you, a little," he pointed out. "So's Lady F. Red's the color of the evening."
Whoops; wrong answer. Maybe it was because he'd been on the receiving end of her domineering nature for a good chunk of his life. Maybe it was just because the temperature suddenly seemed to drop another ten degrees. Whatever the reason, Sid could tell that Mrs. M.'s fight was rising even without being able to see her properly.
"C'mon," he tried, switching to pleading. "Don't try and walk on this stuff anymore than you have to. It's dark, it's dangerous, and you've already come through enough of it." Remembering how the ice and glass inside the conservatory had nicked up his heavy footwear, he'd thrown a pair of short, wide planks from the garage into the back seat. His idea had been to put them down on top of the debris to make a safer path from the worktable to the car. So much for that. "Anyway, I drove up here all right, didn't I? Just wait until we get to the house. Then you can look at me all you want."
The two women exchanged a glance. "...Well," Mrs. M. said imperiously, "so long as you know that you will be held to your promise."
Anything, anything to not be standing out here if the hail came again. Sid grinned – how had he missed them both so much in such a short period of time? – and offered them each an arm. "I'll take that deal, Mrs. M. Now let's get off this hill."