Chapter Text
PROLOGUE: JULY 21, 1927
"What, you aren't put up with his Majesty?"
"Put up by his Majesty, not with him — there are dozens of us in service there, you know; we can't all be holed up in attic rooms."
"But a valet?"
"Second valet," Richard says, but he sounds like he dislikes making the correction. He looks back to the road ahead of them, unsmiling but not stern, either, and he keeps his focus where it ought to be.
It's a good thing, too, because Thomas is staring — not unabashed, but unable to stop himself. He's been hung up on him since he showed him to his room yesterday, and since then it's just been a steady fall, head over heels, hard and fast.
Richard probably doesn't notice. Men never notice anything until they know, and then they always think he's into them when he isn't; still, that doesn't make it a good idea to ogle, or even a safe one. For all he knows, the man has a harem of ladies' maids at Buckingham Palace or something.
Wouldn't put it past him, looking like he does.
"Unusual," he says, finally, but it's not like anything about Richard has been especially usual thus far, and these days he wouldn't have any idea what goes in most London households, anyhow, let alone the big London household.
"Very much so, for a country house," Richard replies. "Or for city houses, but you must understand that at Buckingham Palace, there are servants with servants."
Well, there's that settled.
"Mr. Miller does have an attic room, actually, near the dressing chamber. I will admit he's got… rather more important things to do than I have."
Sheepish is a good look on him, if only because he's seemed fairly smug and self-satisfied since he arrived at the Abbey.
"...but, no, a good deal of the servants' quarters are across the street. Means there's more privacy, to be honest — also means there's a telephone, courtesy of the employer, couldn't afford it otherwise."
"Living in luxury, aren't you, Mr. Ellis?"
"Don't know if I'd go so far as to call it that. Besides, I have to be careful with the thing, it's a party line, more to keep us at beck and call than anything else."
"You don't mean to tell me they've not got a whole bell system rigged up across the street?"
This makes him laugh, which was his intention.
Maybe he only feels this way because it's been so long that anyone new has come around, let alone taken any interest at all in him, let alone looked like something out of a paper advertisement for ties or dressing gowns or trousers or something —
"Remind me to get you the number before I go back up."
Richard does look at him, then, gives him a congenial smile, and Thomas's stomach fills up with butterflies.
The feeling is inconvenient, to say the least, but there's only a quarter of an hour or so left until they're in York — just fifteen minutes of acting like a normal person, and then he can get himself together before Richard's back from his parents' place.
Fifteen minutes.
He can do that.