23rd Frost, 4606
It had been a few weeks since Thomas’ cast had come off. He’d been physically weak for a few days, and had to get his stamina back for going much further than the bathroom, but it had come back quickly. At this point, his right side still felt a bit weaker, but it was much less noticeable. It wasn’t like he had time to kick balls around the schoolyard anyway, so he supposed it didn’t matter much.
Ned, true to his word, had taken care of Thomas for the duration of Thomas’ injuries. He’d found a form that Miss Hannegan could fill out to excuse Thomas from work due to injury, and when she inevitably refused to do it since she had enough to do, Thomas just filled it out and forged her signature, then Ned turned it in. It gave him two months off of work to recover, free of charge, minus a small application fee, which Ned paid. It was a relief to know that he wasn’t in danger of becoming homeless due to an injury, as Grisic did not take kindly to idlers.
Thomas received astounding marks in everything for the first term in his entire life, mainly due to boredom. His literature teacher had taken him aside and asked if he wanted to be put in contact with an apothecary and medicine seller in Starkwayte, to which he enthusiastically agreed. His interview would be in a week, and he’d excitedly went over the basics of compounding as best he could so that he could impress. This could be a way out of cleaning houses, potentially. If he could nail it.
He felt he had more presence at this point than when he’d been a bit younger and sent on the rounds of interviews that characterized the thirteenth year of every orphan in the city, and many poorer children, besides. Hopefully, this Humble Stanford would agree, and would see it as a plus, and he’d be freed from the drudgery that was cleaning houses. He hadn’t realized how much he wasn’t interested in doing it until he returned to it.
It was plain that something odd had happened while he’d been gone, too. When he arrived onsite to his primary assignment, the manor house of Lord Ashley Ryan himself, something was amiss: no girls. There were permanent women servants, sure: the cook, the chambermaids, Lady Ryan’s ladymaid, and so on, but none of the girls assigned to cleaning duty from the orphanage came, and before his injury, that hadn’t been the case.
He tried asking around over dinner, and it was obvious everyone knew but no one wanted to talk about it. Finally, he resorted to bribery, giving a girl in the younger dorms a lemon drop in return for what she knew. What he found out disturbed him, and concerned the younger Lord Ashley Ryan who was nonetheless not quite twenty, and a plain, shy girl a few years younger than him named Eloise. There was no proof, and it was the word of a lowborn little girl against a lordling, so nothing would be done about it even if there had been, but afterward, the girls had refused to go the Ryan estate, so now it was the sole provenance of him and a bunch of boys too young for any other job.
He quickly became the de facto site boss because of this, working with the servants in the household to make the work go more smoothly. He’d been explaining all of this to Ned over dinner, and the other boy seemed to show unusual interest. Thomas wrote it off as merely the fact that his stories didn’t concern sitting on his bed all day any more, but Ned pulled him aside later, wrapping his arms around the shorter boy and kissing the top of his head, which was as far as things went much of the time.
He’d been interested in doing more, but Ned was often too tired from his job at the docks, and made allusions to wanting Thomas’ first time to be somewhere a little bit more romantic than an abandoned corner of the orphanage, anyhow. Personally, Thomas wouldn’t have cared either way, but he trusted Ned, and didn’t want to put pressure on him, so he’d left it alone.
“Thomas,” Ned said, voice characteristically low and almost hoarse. “I have – there’s something to tell you.”
“What is it, my love?” Asked Thomas, unable to help himself from smiling. “And why so serious?”
“I’m – I’m involved in something.” Ned said. “Dangerous for you to know what, exactly. I could use your help, though.”
The vagueness made Thomas uneasy. “Is it anything illegal?” He asked, trying not to sound like a complete knob. He wasn’t a snitch, and didn’t think there was any harm in taking stuff from people who didn’t really need it, but if Ned was using his position to help smuggle stuff, for instance, that was a quick and effective way to end up in the gallows.
Ned didn’t answer at first. After a few seconds, he just nodded.
Thomas sighed. Not promising. “If I do this for you, will it help you stay safe?”
This time, Ned nodded immediately.
“Ok, then. Easy decision. I’ll do it!” Despite himself, Thomas was excited. This sounded like it would be more involved than occasionally filching something from the Ryan household and selling it at a pawn shop.
“Need you to get into Lord Ryan’s letters, Tommy. Look for anything about the workers at Ryan Dyeworks. Copy anything you find, if you have time, or just remember it and summarize it for me that evening. Got it?”
In answer, Thomas hugged him, only too eager to help out. “You can count on me! I won’t let you down.”
Ned chuckled. “I thought so. Thanks, my sweet.” He took Thomas into his arms, which never failed to thrill the other boy. How nice it was, to be embraced, to be loved. Even if Ned hadn’t been handsome and kind, to boot, he would have followed him like a lovesick puppy just for more hugs.
Once he was sure he understood the plan, Thomas wasted no time in enacting it.
The next morning, when he returned to the Ryan estate, rearranged the chore roster so that he would be the one to handle Lord Ryan’s apartments to show that they were taking their duties seriously. The man’s valet, usually a bit of an officious prick, was only too happy to go out for a quick smoke break while Thomas dusted the study, including the rolltop desk. He filched the key from the valet’s jacket, left inside so he wouldn’t reek of purloined tobacco from the selfsame desk, and looked for correspondence regarding the Lord’s Dyeworks.
Most of it seemed dull: production quotas from the site master, a ledger of monthly profits that made Thomas gasp and inadvertently commit the numbers to memory simply because of how high they were, and a log of workers who were identified as troublemakers. It seemed the plant manager was convinced that they were trying to form a union. Based on the correspondence, Lord Ryan was adamant it not be allowed to happen.
Thomas knew he didn’t have enough time to write it all down, but he committed the names to memory, alongside the net profits of the plant. It was just like memorizing lines, or a soliloquy, except it was simultaneously more boring and more exciting. He locked the rolltop and put the key back where he found it, and not a moment too soon, because it wasn’t the valet who returned, but the Lord Himself.
The staff had trained him on what to do. Thomas bowed and then carried on with his duties, not acknowledging the Lord’s presence because he had not been spoken to. The servants’ ideal was to blend into the background, make it so that the highborns didn’t even know someone else was in the room, and Thomas excelled at that in any case.
Lord Ryan, however, seemed to have other plans. “You, boy.”
Not what Thomas wanted to hear. “Yes, my Lord?” He asked with a bow.
“You’re one of my wife’s orphans, yeah? What’s yer name?”
“Thomas, Sir.”
“Well, Thomas, you watch yourself. I’ve noticed they don’t let the girlies come to our house any more, but you’re pretty enough that I’m not sure I mind,” Lord Ryan guffawed at his own joke. Thomas did not join in.
“Thank you, my Lord,” Thomas said, with a bob of his head, because he wasn’t sure what else to do. He felt kind of sick.
When the Lord’s Valet returned, Thomas had never been more thankful to see the odious little toad. While the Valet accounted for his absence, Thomas beat a retreat, heart pounding. He had a fair idea of what had happened to Eloise, and he didn’t want to be next.
Although, at least in his case, the result wouldn’t be being sent away to a work home for unwed mothers, just an unpleasant first time with someone who made his skin crawl. He resolved to tell Ned about all of it later on that evening, and to get some advice on what to do.
He’d found himself relying on the older boy more and more. At first, he had felt a bit bad, and thought of him not unlike a crutch, but as their feelings for one another deepened, Ned had taught Thomas that it was okay to rely on people, and okay to open your heart to them. So he’d bear Lord Ryan’s uncomfortable flirtatious small talk to keep Ned safe with whatever he was doing, and the two of them would soon quit the orphanage for their own lodgings somewhere, like Ned had promised, and they’d live together. Maybe it wouldn’t be happily ever after, but certainly it promised to be happier than anything Thomas had ever experienced. It wasn’t everything, but it was enough for him.
