"It's all a matter of balance."
In all honesty, Jack himself wasn't sure what had come over him when he offered them a ride. Sure, it had felt opportune to arrive when he did, and it would be satisfying to see the conclusion of the Royal Doulton Bowl, but in the normal course of things Jack did have enough sense to know that giving a ride to three children and a grown woman on his bicycle was a bit nonsense. He somewhat meant it as a joke, until Mary didn't. And if Mary Poppins thought it possible, who was Jack to suggest it wasn't? He was never completely certain it hadn't been her idea from start to finish, for all it was him who had offered it in the first place. With her belief in him, he worked out the puzzle of how, trusting in return that the cobbled together ladder seats would actually work because they wouldn't dare otherwise with Mary Poppins as a passenger.
Topsy Turvy, in a street that hadn't seemed to have existed until Mary Poppins directed them down it, was an eye-opening experience for multiple reasons. There was the obvious, that standing on one's head gives a fresh perspective of the world. But there were other ways, subtler. Jack felt it before he even met her, as soon as he stepped onto a street that he knew didn't exist in London. It wasn't that it was welcoming, almost the opposite; it had not felt like a safe refuge for all that it felt magical. The people on it had huddled, as if nervous of them and each other. There was a feel of being apart from London, maybe even apart from time itself. Jack being a slave didn't matter here because being a Citizen didn't matter here; this was a place apart. There were posters up advertising a circus that had come and gone years before, but the posters looked entirely fresh, as if they had just been put up. There was an advert advising them all to 'Buy Bubbub Soap, 2 cents a bar', which was ridiculously cheap by modern standards. And another advertised Vicki's chocolate for £3,99, which sounded absurdly expensive.
Mary Poppins took no notice of any part of the street, let alone the posters, but the children trailed, curious and still on the look out for unexpected magic and Jack followed behind them, somewhat herding them on after their nanny but equally as curious. And Mary Poppins, for all she acted like she was in a hurry, didn't actually come out and tell them to hurry along so Jack took that as permission to explore with them. While the children studied posters or looked curiously at the people slinking past them, Jack took notice of the lamps. They were gas lamps, the sort that still needed a lamplighter, but Jack knew for a fact no leerie had this route. He wondered if they were lit by magic. He knew it was no good asking Mary Poppins; she'd never give a straight answer.
"Missing, Richard Dawes, III," John read out from a poster half hidden by another circus poster that had sense been partially, but not completely scraped off. "Reward for information or return. 10,000 pounds."
"Like Mr. Dawes, Jr. at the bank?" Annabel asked, and they worked together to scrape away the rest of the circus poster so they could see better. There was an actual photo beneath of a boy, so young he couldn't been much more than three or four years old, hair in blond ringlets and dressed in white and, rather unusually, smiling brightly at the camara. If the name hadn't been included, the children might have assumed it to be a little girl, with the ringlets and the way it only showed a frilly white top.
"Who is that?" asked Georgie, naturally enough.
"He went missing in 1808," said John, to himself and not answering his brother really, reading off the poster. "When he was two years old. That's…" he tried to do the math without paper to write it out in, "thirty-seven years…no…it's…"
"Twenty-seven years ago," Jack offered helpfully. Then, when the children looked at him as if expecting him to share all about it he said, "I don't remember anything about that; I was only three at the time." Then he went suddenly quiet, a far-off look in his eyes, not that the children noticed.
"Well, I want to know if the boy was found," Annabel insisted, then looked ahead to where Mary Poppins was tapping a foot impatiently and wondered if she dared ask her about it.
"The boy looks like Jack," Georgie said, after a long moment when no one happened by who could tell them what had happened to young Richard Dawes, III.
"Don't be ridiculous," Annabel refuted at once. "The boy has blond hair."
"He has the same smile," Georgie insisted.
"Come along, spit spot!" Mary Poppins called, and they left the poster behind to follow quickly on down the street until they came to the correct door.
Tatiana Antanasia Cositori Topotrepolovsky was cautious, understandably so considering what was about to happen to her house. What stood out to Jack, and possibly Jack alone, for it was not something a free Citizen child were likely to notice, was how she seemed to fall into that same groove as Mary Poppins: not exactly a Citizen but definitely not a slave.
She had no collar, of course, so the second was obvious. The first…it was in the way she completely failed to notice Jack's collar or acknowledge his status in any way. Even Michael Banks, someone Jack was coming to consider a good man, could not help but reflect the world he lived in. He didn't look down on Jack, perhaps, but all the ways he went out of his way to avoid the 'put them in their place' gestures that many free Citizens performed were clearly deliberate and just as surely defined their differences in standing as if he had performed those gestures. Topsy treated Jack no differently than the children or Mary Poppins, not in a deliberate 'I'm defying cultural standards' but as if she did not even notice such standards existed to be defied.
The closest she ever came to acknowledging that Jack was a slave was to grab him by the arm as they were leaving, lean in close, and murmur, "Come to Topsy if you ever want that taken care of." And she tapped the collar with a finger, making the 'free day pass' sway jiggle. "No charge."
And then they were all herded out the door, while Jack was still trying to comprehend her words and to work out if they meant what they seemed to mean.
Slave collars don't come off easy. They weren't like a status necklace; there was no latch, not even for a master who decided they wanted their slave's throat free for whatever reason. They were an unremovable status symbol, considered more humane than a tattoo or branding. They were carefully crafted; having something about a person's throat could be dangerous and someone at some point had actually gone to the trouble of shaping them so that strangling a slave by grabbing the collar was virtually impossible. They were not designed to be attractive either, not for City slaves. And they were welded on. They weren't meant to come off except under drastic circumstances or upon a slave's death. Jack had worn this collar since the day it was noted he had outgrown his previous collar, the only other reason for collars to change as a child slave became an adult slave. It was almost incomprehensible, what Topsy seemed to be suggesting. In many ways, it was actually a bit disturbing a thought to Jack, as if she had offered to lop off a body part. But no, it wouldn't be like that. It'd be like removing an unwanted growth.
Of course, removing a slave's collar was illegal, and it wouldn't magically transform Jack into a free Citizen either. He'd have to leave London, and to really get anywhere he'd need a forged identity. Or stay in hidden places, like this street. It would be a lie if Jack said the thought had never crossed his mind to wonder what it would be like, if he could do it. But he also wondered what it would be like to be a bird, or to be a knight. Those were fairytale dreams, nothing real, nothing he ever intended to try for.
The children hadn't noticed the exchange, or Jack's quiet; they chatted to each other over their surprise magical experience on the ceiling and wondered if they dared tell their dad or aunt about it all.
"They wouldn't believe us," John pointed out sensibly. "I wouldn't believe us."
"If we tell them, we'd have to tell them about Mother's bowl," It occurred to Annabel. "That we broke it, I mean, not that we went inside it."
"But we're fixing it," Georgie said, which was true enough.
"Do you think someone at the bank might know about the boy…what was it…Richard Dawes, III?" John wondered, glancing towards the posters as they passed them on their way back to London proper.
"Oh, we couldn't ask there," Annabel said, shocked. "If the boy was a relation to someone in the bank…just think…it would be rude…and cruel. Bringing it all up." Then they couldn't discuss much of anything because Mary Poppins was not of a mind to allow for dawdling and then because it is hard to hold a conversation while riding together on a bicycle, though they all thought it would not be too rude or too cruel to bring it up with their father. He'd have been young when it happened, just like Jack, but he worked at the bank. He must know something.
They had a chance to talk to their aunt before their father, for all they were on the way to the bank. If they did try to share the whole story, or to ask after the boy, they did it all talking over each other and their aunt had not the remotest idea what they were talking about. What she did figure out from their talk was the name of their new companion.
"You're Jack!" she said, then felt her cheeks going pink at blurting out something so obvious and pointless. She felt she had to explain, and said, "I've been trying to meet you." Only then she suddenly realized that it would not be helpful or kind to blurt out 'because I hear you were beaten harshly and unfairly and I want you to tell me all about it'. Not there on the street, with the children and Mary Poppins around, and who knew who listening in. She couldn't think of a good reason instead to have wanted to meet him, except, "Michael told me about giving you a ride…he said you were the same little boy who used to wave up to us."
"Oh, do you remember that?" Jack asked, lighting up in his delight, as if that were a perfectly normal thing for a person to be chasing him down over.
"You've still got the same smile," Jane answered, which was true, but it was only after she said it that it occurred to her it sounded a bit suggestive. She wasn't trying to flirt with him, and not just because flirting with slaves could get one in trouble; she had real business with him and flirting would be unprofessional. If he noticed how suggestive her words were, he gave no sign, not even a slight widening of the eyes or a dimming of his smile. Jane smiled nervously back and hoped she'd remember how to talk properly soon and that Jack really would be able to stop by SPRUCE.
Then, for a moment, Jack's smile did dim, not because he was upset but because this meeting had stirred another memory from the night before.
"SPRUCE," he said, and then, when it was Jane's turn to stare at him with wide eyes, "Charlie told us about how you waved him down, looking for me." And then he laughed, as if remembering something amusing.
"Perhaps you could go to SPRUCE together and learn about each other," Mary Poppins offered. "We can walk the rest of the way to the bank; it's only just around the corner."
Which was how Jack ended up with a single passenger who, it turned out, was terrible at giving directions. She kept forgetting until they were almost as the street they needed to turn down that Jack didn't know where they were going and had to shout, almost as they passed it, 'Turn here!'. Luckily, a bicycle is more versatile than a car and Jack never seemed put out about it, and they arrived in one piece. It helped that Charlie had shared the address and, while Jack could not boast a perfect understanding of each and every street in London, he had known the general direction they needed to go.
It was not a particularly impressive headquarters. That was at least partially deliberate; the sort of people they wanted a connection with would likely have avoided them if they had put themselves in a nice office in a well-off area. But partly it was because the space was cheap and that suited the organization. And for all that the street was not well kept in this corner of London, and the neighboring buildings had a distinctly poverty-stricken décor of cracked or boarded up windows, peeling paint, and unpleasant weedy plants growing about them, SPRUCE had made an effort with what it had to at least not look like someone was going to knife whoever dared walked through the door. The front was freshly painted, what little bit of earth that was in front of it might not have managed to grow plants but at least it also had no weeds or trash, and its windows, those left unshuttered, had clean and uncracked glass to let in what light could find its way.
Inside was clean, if not tidy; the small office Jane led him to had papers sprawled all over in a comfortable mess of flyers, newspaper articles, and copies of public records. It looked the sort of disorganized chaos that showed someone actually did work here. He would not be surprised to learn that Jane knew exactly where, in the mess, any document she wanted could be located. Jane, for her part, was a bit dismayed to look on the mess with new eyes, and rather wished she had made more of an effort to tidy up that morning.
"Oh," she said, "It's not usually this…I mean…" she began, quickly shuffling papers into neater piles and freeing enough chairs of their loads so that the two of them could sit down. Then, when she had a book open, ready to take notes, and Jack sat across from her, alert and curious if sitting a bit stiffly, Jane had a moment where she had absolutely no idea of where to begin. Luckily for her, Jack was not in the least awkward or shy, and started the conversation himself.
"You know, it's a bit silly, because I know it's just the first letters and it doesn't mean anything…but I was expecting more plants," said Jack. And then, helpfully, when all Jane did was blink at him in a bewildered sort of way. "You know…SPRUCE. I just thought there'd be plants."
"We were going to call it the Protective Institution against the Suffering of Slavery," said Jane, "Until we made up a mock flyer and saw the result."
It only occurred to Jane after Jack had worked out what that acronym came to and laughed out loud that she had no reason to assume Jack would have enough education to see the punch line.
"I can see why you went with SPRUCE," he said, and she was so relieved that she hadn't inadvertently embarrassed him or put her foot in her mouth, again, that she giggled herself, before cutting herself off, remembering she is meant to be professional.
It was easy to be professional soon after, because small talk aside at some point she had to explain what she wanted from Jack, knowing it would likely be unpleasant for both of them.
"You see," she explained, "Things are better than they once were, with all the laws in place protecting slaves. But there is too much room for interpretation, which leads to the abuse of slaves and, as I'm sure you are aware, there is very little a slave can do to protest. We want to change that. We want to make it where no discipline of a slave can involve hitting or harming in any way."
"Why Miss Banks," said Jack, "However will we lazy scoundrels be incentivized to work if there's no threat of the lash?"
It was such a perfect imitation of the sort of Citizen Jane was fighting against that she was hard pressed not to giggle again, as inappropriate as it would be. Not that Jack seemed to mind; his face was still morphed into a stern imitation but his eyes were laughing. Instead, Jane tried to answer the question just as if it were put forth by such a gentleman.
"By offering rewards for good efforts, sir," she said.
Jack laughed then, and in his own voice said, "And I suppose there are ways enough to make a man miserable without having to beat him bloody." Jane made a face at that.
"And we'd like you to share those ways," she said. "Because being 'made miserable' is not what we're aiming for here."
Jack slowly stopped smiling, his expression morphing into something more serious. His eyes were very intense as they bore into hers.
"And what are you aiming for, here?"
"Justice. Fairness." Kindness, she did not say, for all it was one of the aims, because it wasn't the kind of word that was going to reach the average Citizen off the streets. "Modernity." A modern society of an advanced civilization should be above such brutality, they'd say.
"And what do you need from me?"
"Start by sharing, if you can, exactly what happened yesterday morning." She felt awkward saying 'when you were unjustly beaten beyond the scope of the law', but she didn't need to. They both knew what she meant. "And…if you would not be too uncomfortable…perhaps allow us the documentation of your wounds? Not by me…I'd aske my male colleague to help with that."
Jack was silent for a long moment. Talking was not just uncomfortable; he'd had a lifetime to teach him that talking about such things with a free Citizen could be dangerous. And as for documentation, whatever that meant…it did not sound ideal.
"It's healed a lot since," Jack said after a long moment. Jane had allowed him to think it over without interruption; she seemed to know exactly what she was asking of him and didn't expect an instant answer. Then, "A…friend…had some medicine and that has helped."
"I'm glad," said Jane, earnestly if a bit surprised. She had enough experience in such interviews to understand that medical intervention was rare and only occurred in extreme cases or, occasionally, through less than legal acquisitions of pain killers or salves. Then, when Jack said nothing else, she said gently, "Do you think you can share your experience? You're allowed to say no to any part of the process or to change your mind. I can even leave your name out of things."
"But it would help your cause to have documented evidence with actual names, wouldn't it?" Jack said shrewdly.
"None of this is any good if we end up hurting the ones we are trying to help," Jane answered firmly. "This is all your decision, and no one will be upset or disappointed if you say 'no'."
Jack considered this, looked her in the eyes, and said, "Yes. To all of it. I will."
Jane blinked a bit, because she had already braced herself for a 'no' or a 'yes, but leave out my name', or 'yes, but no documentation of injuries'. She did not exactly smile then, because none of this felt like the moment for smiles. But she did nod her head, arrange her book and pen, and ready herself.
"Alright then…in your own time."
Meanwhile, in the bank, three children were conducting a bit of an interrogation of their own. If it could be called as such when they weren't so much asking questions and shouting accusations. They had meant to quietly come and ask questions of the bank director.
"Shall we ask Mr. Dawes Jr. about little Richard?" Georgie suggested as they made their way up an uncomfortable number of stairs. Even if they had known how to find the lift, the stairs had been right in front of them when they had made their escape and so it was up the stairs they went. How Georgie even had the breath to ask questions neither of his siblings could understand. They had to pause a moment before they could huff out an answer.
"You are not to mention him," Annabel insisted, while John said, "Anyway, it's Mr. Wilkins in charge now; I heard them talking about it. I think he's Mr. Dawes, jr.'s nephew or cousin or something."
Then Annabel followed that up with, "And we have to be quiet or we'll be caught and we won't be able to ask for anything." And they trudged up the rest of the stairs. After all that, they didn't get anything except for the horrible knowledge that Mr. Wilkins was a bad man who was working against them, an angry father who was in danger of losing his job over their actions, and some sweets from Mr. Wilkin's slave who was called, somewhat ironically considering slaves weren't allowed money, Penny.
They honestly meant to go straight home, after. But their heads very full, and their hearts were heavy and sore, and it took a surprisingly long time for any of them to notice that, rather than following Mary Poppins back to their own street, she had been following them down unfamiliar ways.
At least, Annabel thought she might recognize a shop they passed as being close to their aunt's workplace, but a fog had come that made the streets strange and unknown and she couldn't be sure.
In fact, Annabel was quite right, which was how Jack, who otherwise should have been nowhere near, his own head and heart rather full with unpleasantness after first sharing the truth of what had happened (or as near the truth as he needed to; there was the truth and then there was stupidity if he had willfully acknowledged purposefully stealing an apple. He kept up the claim that he had knocked it off the stall by accident. If Jane read between the lines and understood differently, she never said anything.). The 'documentation' was even worse; Jack hated baring himself at all, particularly in front of strangers. He actually would have preferred Jane do it, except Miss Banks looked so nervous and awkward over even asking it of him and repeated so many times that it would be a male doing that bit that he hadn't dared ask.
They offered him food, after, but he hadn't felt up to eating much. They'd also offered pain killers and a salve, which he'd reluctantly accepted if only because he could imagine how Angus would react if he ever learned Jack had refused either. And then the interview was over and he felt so out of sorts after opening up in ways he never did that he'd simply left, not even taking his bicycle, just walking, searching for a place he could sort himself out. He'd climbed a wall because it felt familiar and comfortable. He liked high places; people so rarely looked up that it was a wonderful way to hide in plain sight, and he felt a part of things in some strange way, as if he himself were another lamp or spout doing its bit to make London the City it was. And walls or rooftops were sturdier thinking places than trees or lamp posts. He had just about returned himself, humming a soft tune, trying to convince himself it was time to go turn up the lamps as the fog started rolling down the streets and not quite managing. It wasn't even that he had explicit permission to not do his leerie duties that evening; he had a strange feeling of waiting for something.
And then he heard the soft high pitched querulous tones of children and he knew why he was there.