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Once, when Lesley was seven and about three months after it happened, she had sat at family dinner and swung her legs as she idly turned a fork around strands of spaghetti and said, rather nonchalantly, that she hoped that when her parents died Mr Nightingale would come and look after her, too.
Her father had dropped a plate in horror; her mother had been furious that she would even say such a terrible thing; one of her sisters had burst into tears. Lesley had been sent to bed without any pudding, and hadn’t really known why.
Later, her mother had come upstairs to tuck her in and mend their bonds. She had sat comfortingly on the duvet by Lesley’s hip and stroked her hair and offered gentle, sad little smiles. “Nothing is going to happen to your dad and me,” she had said firmly. “But if it does, you and your sisters will go and live with your Auntie Judy; you don’t have to worry about some stranger looking after you. And you’ll always have your sisters, won’t you?”
And Lesley had nodded, and suffered to be kissed, and been left in the dark of her teeny tiny pokey cupboard of a bedroom. But she rather thought that her mother hadn’t really understood the point.
She hadn’t, either, of course. She just hadn’t seen Peter for a while, and there had been a lot of whispers about something terrible happening but no-one would tell her what, and then he came back to school and sat next to her like he always did even though Jenny Wilkes kept saying he had a crush on her, so, no change. But then, at the end of the day, they pile out onto the playground swinging bookbags and lunchboxes wildly as they attempt to escape school before actually managing to stuff their arms into their coat sleeves - and Peter grinds to a halt, so she stops with him. Follows his gaze.
The man looks like a picture from those old movies her parents watch sometimes, when they’ve wrested control of the remote out of the scrum of preteen-to-teenage girls with which they’ve filled their house. He is wearing a suit, even though it’s just the school run, and he would have stood out anyway in this sea of denim-decked young mums, but he also has a cane tucked under one arm and a neatly-folded newspaper in his hands. He’s twirling a pen between his fingers; Lesley reckons he’s doing the crossword, maybe. He looks - weird. Old, but not old - like a perfectly normal man, born about a hundred years too late.
Lesley had sort of forgotten, by the time three thirty rolled around, that Peter wouldn’t be going home to his parents. He hadn’t said where he would be going instead.
She turns her back on the strange man. “Is that-?” she hisses.
Peter shuffles his feet, looks at the floor, and then nods. Lesley doesn’t know how she was going to end her sentence, so she’s glad that Peter answered - but she still doesn’t really know who this man is, except Peter’s new something. But he doesn’t look keen to go to him.
Lesley leans in. “I don’t think he’s seen us yet. We could make a run for it over the wall, across the field, and go to Sainsbury’s?”
Peter offers her half a smile. They’ve never done it, but they’d worked out the route they would take - if they only had the courage to skive, and the pocket money for a bag of doughnuts to share. “I don’t think we’d get away with it,” he says, rather apologetically.
Lesley frowns, her stealth impugned. “Why not?”
Peter just nods over her shoulder. She spins; of course, the mystery man is waiting patiently a way behind her. Not near enough to listen, but his eyes definitely upon them. Lesley’s instincts do battle, and decide that clinging to Peter’s sleeve is a good middle ground between hiding behind him and putting herself between Peter and the man. He is just - too weird.
Noticing that he has their attention, the man approaches. There’s a small, polite smile on his face that doesn’t look entirely at home there; he doesn’t look at home anywhere, really, with a strange tension to his posture like he’s waiting for some other shoe to drop. But there is still something quietly imposing about him, like the lazy tigers in the zoo Lesley had watched idle for ages, until feeding time. “Hello, Peter,” he says, voice clipped and proper like a Radio Four newscaster. “How was your day?”
Peter shrugs; Lesley recognises the gesture, from going ‘round his after school and watching him be subjected to the same line of questioning from his mother. But where Mrs Grant would have pressed and pried and affectionately threatened her darling son with a slipper, weekend employment, or comparison with some cousin or another, the man just blinks at this non-answer, and lets the moment go. “Um, Lesley, this is Nightingale,” Peter says, gesturing awkwardly towards the man. “This is - Lesley.”
“Ah, of course,” the man - Nightingale - says, seeming to feel himself on slightly more solid ground, and Lesley wonders if she has frequently been the topic of conversation, and if that’s good or not. She thinks it probably is. “Good afternoon, Lesley. It is a pleasure to meet you,” Nightingale says with a tiny half-bow that he maybe doesn’t even know he’s making and an actual proper smile, if a small one, and it’s so formal and careful and unexpectedly charming that Lesley nearly wants to curtsey, like she’s playing dress-up as a princess or a lady or a Victorian maid.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you too,” she echoes carefully, and Nightingale’s grin is quick as a flash.
Nightingale drives them all to Lesley's house in a massive black car that smells like leather and wood oil, so that she doesn’t have to hang around in the library until her sisters have finished their after-school clubs and her mum can pick them all up. Normally, she would go home with Peter for Monday afternoons and play with his Lego and eat spicy rice that makes her whole face go red until her dad gets off work and can swing by to take her home, but her dad doesn’t know where Peter’s new house is, so. And it kind of seems like Nightingale wouldn’t like spicy rice all that much anyway.
Lesley and Peter leave Nightingale in the kitchen with her mum to exchange telephone numbers and addresses and do grown-up stuff, and charge up to her tiny room to get out as many toys as possible in the small space not occupied by wardrobe, bed, and children, on the theory that if they’ve already started playing when one or other of the adults suggests it’s home time they might be more likely to be granted leave to stay. Or if nothing else, the toys can form a sort of rudimentary barricade to keep them out.
Peter puts his hand down on a surprisingly vicious Kinder egg dinosaur that had, somehow, got loose from the shoebox castle Lesley made specifically to house him, the stable of hand-me-down Hotwheels, and her one Sylvanian Families badger; he shakes his palm vigorously and makes a face. “We should go to mine next time,” he tells her. “My room’s much bigger than this one, and my old one. Oh! We can finally make the Lego castle, with all the walls and stuff.”
The Lego castle is their white whale, their magnum opus in potentia, the culmination of their dreams, and requires at least three times the floor space Peter’s old room had offered if it is to be realised in full. The vision of it, sprawling over carpet and dominating the landscape of a bedroom, swims in glorious technicolour before Lesley’s eyes. It would be beautiful; they would have to go to Peter’s new house as soon as possible. But, at the same time-
“Where do you live,” Lesley asks incredulously, “Buckingham Palace?”
“No,” Peter says, with a cheeky grin that, by turns, makes her want to be his friend forever and/or smack him. Presently, she is leaning towards the latter. “It’s called the Folly, and it’s huge, and we have a servant and everything.”
Lesley’s jaw drops in astonishment, admiration, and seething white-hot envy. “No way.”
“Yeah,” Peter says, chin jutted out smugly. “I can eat whatever I want, and I get bacon for breakfast.”
Lesley is open-mouthed, ready to retort and refute and possibly get shouty, but then her door opens and Nightingale is standing in it, gazing upon the plastic detritus with some measure of confusion and concern. She closes her mouth and hunches a little, trying to look innocent of nearly shouting at a guest.
“Tell Lesley, we do have a servant,” Peter demands, for which Nightingale offers him a stern look. “Please.”
“We have a housekeeper,” Nightingale corrects, as if that makes any kind of difference. “And Molly simply cooks and cleans and lives with us; I gather that a lot of the mothers at your school do that every day, do they not?”
Peter shrugs in concession, and Lesley tries to look mollified. But it isn’t the same, and they all know it, and it isn’t fair. She tries to think about the castle, and maybe she’ll be invited over for dinner so Molly can cook for her too. She is glad for Peter. She is.
Nightingale hitches his trousers and crouches down to their level, examining the toys carefully. Peter affixes a suitably sweet and pleading expression to his face. “May Lesley come over and play, please?” Lesley raises an eyebrow at him - he’s laying it on too thick, no grown-up would buy it - and is rather surprised to find Nightingale doing likewise, in tandem. Peter pauses, gaze flickering between them; he tacks on another please for good measure.
Nightingale inclines his head slowly. “She may, if she so pleases,” he says solemnly, and Lesley has to bite her lip or smile. “I have, in fact, arranged with her mother to have Miss May over for dinner every Monday after school - if you would like to, Lesley.”
Lesley nods enthusiastically and Peter grins at her. The castle would be realised; she would see the Folly, and the servant, and eat the dinners; and she wouldn’t have to wait around after school any more. Maybe Nightingale is alright.
Maybe, just a little bit, Peter would share him with her.
Nightingale is the least cool wizard in the world.
Lesley and Peter have presented him with everything from polite requests to messy, childish pleading, and even that most irrefutable evidence of all, The Sword In The Stone, in which a child meets a wizard and gets to do all kinds of fun stuff like be turned into a fish and become king of Albion and doesn’t get brain damage once, but it is all to no avail: Nightingale will not teach them any magic.
He also won’t sit with them for hours and do all of the spells he knows just so they can watch: he’ll do a few, with Peter and Lesley and Molly all watching avid and greedy, but then he invariably gets called away to do some other thing, for his other - more boring - job of being a policeman. And even though he probably could, he doesn’t use magic for just anything. If Lesley could do magic, she would do stuff like mend toys which have been trodden on, or been chewed by Toby, or stolen by one of her sisters and returned in much worse condition - but Nightingale doesn’t. He says that he is sorry, but that she and Peter ought to take better care of their things, else damage is inevitable.
He doesn’t even mend the record.
They’re playing in a spare room - the Folly having plenty, and the novelty of such a concept having not yet worn off on Peter and Lesley - and Peter has been in a weird mood all day. His heart doesn’t seem to be in anything, all restless and listless by turns, and Lesley reckons he needs cheering up. Back at his parents’ house, the good afternoons had been the ones when you could hear jazz, lilting and smooth, emitting from the main bedroom, because that meant his dad was feeling better and that meant that his mum would be more cheerful and relaxed about unruly children making a mess of her lovely home. They could play louder and longer and, come evening, Lesley could share some less-spicy rice with Mr Grant and feel a bit better about not wanting the really strong stuff. So - music good, and there’s a cardboard box of records in the corner next to the player. It’s one of those really old record players, too, with the big trumpet on top like the HMV logo, because the Folly is just like this.
Only she’s barely got the record out of its sleeve before Peter spots what she’s doing and screams at her.
He charges across the room, toys and bits of Lego flying away from his feet like a parting wave, and he’s yelling don’t touch that, don’t touch them, never touch it you’re not allowed, and then he yanks the black disk from her hands. It’s easy: she was holding it like Mr Grant had always insisted they should do, even if he’d never let them actually touch his precious collection, with her fingertips cradling the very edges of the record. Her first thought is a mild and distant concern that Peter’s put his fingerprints on the vinyl, grabbing it like that, and then -
Then he yells, animal and primal and pained, and throws Mr Grant’s record like a frisbee to shatter against the wall.
Footsteps rapid and sharp against the marble outside, and then the door flies open and Nightingale is there. His eyes track all around the room like he’s looking for something, and then he allows his gaze to settle on the black shards on the floor - on Peter, red-faced and breathing hard like he’s been running - on Lesley, hands drawn defensively up to her chest and silent tears tracking down her cheeks.
He steps forward very carefully, placing his shiny leather shoes precisely in the gaps between their toys until he is standing before them both, and then he crouches down to their level. “Lesley,” he says very gently, but his eyes are locked on Peter and it’s like she’s not really there. “Why don’t you go down to the kitchen? I’m sure Molly can get you some squash.”
Peter’s hands are tensing and untensing convulsively into fists. “Okay,” Lesley says around the lump in her throat, and she’s proud of how her voice doesn’t shake, not really. Not much.
Molly gives her a whole plate of biscuits to eat, and a big glass of orange squash, and even tries to get her to have a cup of tea even though she doesn’t like it much. Lesley thinks it’s because Molly might have been worried, a little bit, when she appeared pale-faced, with tear stains on her jumper cuffs where she’d scrubbed her eyes angrily, and notably without Peter. Molly had even reached out with her long, pale fingers and poked at Lesley’s forehead, like someone who had seen a parent check for a child’s fever, or maybe read about it in a book, but never done it themself; Molly’s fingers are always ice-cold, anyway, so she’s not sure how much use it would be.
It’s nice, anyway, to have this much attention all to herself for a change, and she’s even feeling halfway normal by the time Nightingale comes down without his suit jacket to say that Peter’s tired and has gone to bed early, and would she like him to drive her home now rather than stay for tea? And she sits in the front seat of the Jag and talks to Nightingale about her history project for the term, and when they get home and Lesley’s mum asks why she’s back early Lesley says that Peter wasn’t feeling very well without any prompting or awkwardness - and for that, Nightingale offers her a small and tired, but very real and very grateful smile and pats her gently on the shoulder in understanding. She feels a little bit like a grown-up, then: all mixed-up and serious and kind, and like she and Nightingale are in on something together, for Peter’s sake.
But it’s still not quite there. She had turned in the doorway before running off to Molly, and Nightingale had got Peter wrapped up in his arms and crying into the shoulder of his very fine suit jacket, cradling the back of his head in one capable hand like Peter was the most important thing in the universe - the only thing in the universe.
No-one’s held her like that. It hurts.
“Put your head in,” Nightingale says, with more amusement than severity. “You’ll eat flies.”
It is a beautiful day, and they are going on an Outing.
“Thomas!” Lesley’s mum had said as she opened the door, and Lesley and Peter had attempted to become one with the sofa cushions for at least the remainder of this episode of Horrible Histories.
“Lesley, Peter’s adult is here, so,” Meg informs them loudly, striding in as Nightingale is ushered into the kitchen. “It’s my turn to watch telly.”
“Shut up,” Lesley says automatically, passing Peter the remote to hide under a cushion.
Meg puts her hands on her hips. “It’s not fair,” she says.
“Uh huh,” Lesley agrees, not looking away from the screen except, for a moment, to catch Peter’s eye and share their secret amusement. It works - Meg huffs dramatically and stomps off, and Peter extends a fist to bump against hers.
“The fifteenth?” Lesley’s mum is saying. “The Friday - oh, yes, I meant to ask you about that, actually. Could you have Lesley for the day? It’s Tanya’s swimming meet, and Meg is having friends over, and Henry’s at work all day so it would be a real favour - I’m sure she’d rather be out with Peter than stuck in here!”
“Ah,” Nightingale says, in that taut way of his that Lesley and Peter are, by now, pretty sure means he wants to swear. She glances at Peter, also listening in, who grins. Lesley gets the distinct feeling that Nightingale had been about to ask her mother to take Peter for the day, and is now frantically recalculating. “Well - yes, alright. I have to head out of the city for the day, but - I suppose they could come.”
“How lovely,” Lesley’s mum had said with relief - and she hadn’t been wrong.
Peter, obediently, pulls his head back into the Jag to grin at Nightingale. “You’re worse than Toby,” Nightingale muses, eyes half on the road and half on them in the back seat, and then he and Lesley have to laugh when Peter sticks his tongue out and pants happily.
She can’t quite blame him for wanting to wind the window down and push his head out, though. The sun is blazingly hot, turning fields of yellow flowers blindingly nearly-neon as they roar along little country roads between hedgerows and along the lines of rolling hills and ridges. The world seems to stretch further and greener than Lesley has ever seen, as though the downland goes on forever and ever beyond the lines of trees and distant, hazy ridges. The day is incandescent, and it feels like they’re all on holiday together, this random Friday in August.
Nightingale sends them both out to open an old five bar gate so that the Jag can rumble through between the tall hedgerows, although he then of course doesn’t stop to pick them back up again. “Hey!” Peter calls, hands spread helplessly; Nightingale sticks his hand out of his window and waves backward as he drives on. “I swear, he’s so annoying,” Peter grumbles, glancing briefly at Lesley in mingled commiseration and embarrassment.
She jams her hands in the pockets of her new jeans (new-ish; they had been Meg’s until a week ago and a three-inch growth spurt) and leans back to put her face, eyes closed, to the sunshine. The countryside is so noisy, but not how the city is - it’s all buzzing and humming and crinkling, like the heat itself is solid and crunching underfoot. “You like him really,” she tells the sky.
She cracks an eye open in time to see Peter give a great jumbled shrug that means yeah, alright, shut up. It’s been nearly four years since - since he moved in with Nightingale, and it’s not been easy. Lesley’s not an idiot. Even if he never said, even if they didn’t practically live in each other’s pockets, she’d know. About the nights he doesn’t sleep, the awkward loneliness of being the only child in a house built for hundreds and occupied only by different sorts of ghosts, the arguments he sometimes has with Nightingale about why he can’t see his aunts and uncles and cousins and go home.
But it’s not been as difficult as it might have been, she thinks. Lesley knows her parents love her, reckons they like her, but - she’s one of six. They can’t always choose her.
Nightingale always chooses Peter.
“Come on,” Peter says, tipping his head in the direction of the departed car and the neat little farmhouse at the end of the lane. Lesley falls easily into step as they amble down the road, chalk dust kicking up and coating their trainers. “You got your new uniform yet?”
She shrugs, tilts her head. “Getting Tanya’s old stuff, aren’t I. New shoes next weekend, though.”
Peter nods, eyes tracking around the hedgerows with vague interest. “He’s bought me the most enormous blazer,” he says, nodding in Nightingale’s vague direction. “Says it’s traditional. I think he reckons I’m going to grow four feet by the time we’re in Year Eleven - I can’t get my fingers out the end of the sleeves.”
Lesley grins. She can just imagine Nightingale solemnly telling him so, eyes sparkling, and the image of Peter sullenly drowning in his new uniform is hilarious. “First day in your new uniform - is he gonna take pictures? Stick you up on the mantelpiece?”
Peter shoves her shoulder and she goes giggling sideways. There are pictures of Peter on the mantelpiece in the library Nightingale favours - of the last school picture day, Peter’s tenth birthday with all their classmates circled around the enormous cake Molly had baked and iced and dotted with candles, and Peter and Lesley pressed against one blank wall of the kitchen in their socks, heels flat on the floor but trying to be as tall as humanly possible, grinning at the camera. She has no idea why grown-ups want to know how tall their kids are at whatever age, but Nightingale does, and he’d quite quickly worked out that the easiest way to get Peter to stand still and have his little pencil mark made on the wall at the top of his head was to have Lesley do it too. This way, Peter has someone to compare growth rates against in that vaguely-scientific way he so enjoys, and both of them can indulge in some competitive growing. There’s lots of little lines reaching up that wall now, all neatly dated and initialled PG or LM.
“He probably is going to take pictures, as well,” Peter grouses, kicking at a stone. “He’s making a huge deal of it, as if secondary school is going to fundamentally change me as a person, or whatever.”
Her parents are, too. But for them, it’s all oh, all our little girls have grown up! All of them in secondary school, can you believe it? And that’s maybe less about Lesley getting older than it is her parents getting older. She has no idea if Peter growing up makes Nightingale feel old, too.
She nudges him in the shoulder. “Might not be so bad if it did - you might get less annoying,” she says nonchalantly, subtly speeding up so that she has a head start when he lunges after her. Her legs are longer than his, but he’s a bit faster - they’re quite well-matched, racing down the lane and laughing.
They skid to a stop in the yard by unspoken agreement, looking around. It’s all white and dusty chalk underfoot until it reaches grass, where it abruptly rolls away downhill into a great bowl-shaped valley filled with trees, fields and a distant market town. The house stands in full sunshine at the crest of this rise; Peter makes an appreciative face, but to her it’s just whitewashed with red tiles on the roof and window boxes of blousy red flowers. It’s both very normal and extremely boring, for a hedge-wizard’s secret lair.
A portly white gentleman, resembling nothing so much as an elderly Fat Controller, sticks his head around the side of the house, face wreathed in smiles. “You must be Peter and Lesley! I’ve heard so much about you,” he says jovially, eyebrows wriggling about like cheerful, very poisonous caterpillars. “The name’s Stannard. Pleasure! Come on round.”
They follow as Stannard bustles happily down a small set of brick steps cut into the slope, heading onto a large flat lawn apparently permanently set up for croquet. A vast, spreading tree sits in one corner, shading a good quarter of the grass and a furniture set of peeling white-painted wrought-iron chairs and a table, prettily set out with a striped tablecloth, tea set, and more of the blousy flowers.
“Did you enjoy the walk?” Nightingale inquires politely, reclined in one of the chairs with his long legs stretched out before him and crossed elegantly at the ankle, and a teacup and saucer in his hands. He takes a long sip when Peter makes a face at him, eyes twinkling like he might otherwise be grinning.
“Do make yourselves at home,” the hedge-wizard says, gesturing at the chairs, tea set, and battered tartan biscuit tin as he lowers himself into a seat. “No obligation, et cetera. The mallets are in the shed, if you fancy a game,” Stannard adds, nodding towards the croquet posts.
Lesley glances at Peter. They’d watched Heathers once about a year ago, accidentally subsumed into one of Jess’ sleepovers and transfixed by the film in a combination of horror and fascination, so they do know what croquet is, if not how to play it. The mallets have promise, though. Peter tilts his head in the direction of the shed, hand sliding out at the same time to snag a biscuit from the tin.
“Eat your biscuit first,” Nightingale says sternly, with a glance so powerful it seats both of them at once. “We’ll teach you the rules when I’ve had a look around.”
“Hah!” Stannard booms cheerfully. “All work no play, Thomas, you know what they say. Well, well, as you like. You’re free to wander whither you will, of course - I shall stay here. Don’t want to muddy the waters whilst you’re-” he waves a hand idly, “-completing your magical survey, or whatever it was that warrant thingummy said. Imagine! Back in the day,” he says to Peter and Lesley rather conspiratorially, “Nightingale here would have just blown the damn doors off, hah! Now, it’s the right of every citizen to commit the odd crime and not get noticed. Brave new world, eh?”
Nightingale sets his teacup down and gets to his feet wearing a thin little smile. “I’m not sure the rights of man are quite so bad as that,” he says wryly. “I shouldn’t be long,” he says, fixing Peter, then Lesley, with a firm, comforting look. “But I shall be inside if you need me.”
Lesley nods and Peter offers him a little thumbs-up, which is probably just to annoy him; Nightingale rolls his eyes. “Not taking the lad in with you?” Stannard exclaims, fingers falling apart as he sits forward in surprise. “Don’t tell me you’re not training the boy - how’s he to learn his duty?” Lesley tries very hard to keep her expression at that sting (it’s like she’s not even here) as brief as possible - like how sometimes, when he thinks no-one is watching, Nightingale goes from perfect equanimity to a ferocious scowl and back to normal again in half a second with no trace left over, like a thundercloud momentarily sliding over the sun and burning briskly away. Judging from the little guilty, apologetic look Peter shoots her way, shoulders curling in slightly on a wince, Nightingale might have made good use of those extra years in practising his subtlety.
Nightingale’s hand settles gently on her shoulder, but he’s calmly staring Stannard down when she looks up at his face. “No, not yet,” he says, quiet and steady as granite.
Stannard glances at Lesley and his face clears slightly; he waves his hands in a little apology. “No reason the girl shouldn’t learn too, of course,” he adds. “Get ‘em spotting vestigia as soon as possible, I say.”
“They’re both still rather young, I think, for this sort of work,” Nightingale says, in a way that makes it abundantly clear that what he thinks is, in fact, something about which he is quite decided.
“No younger than you and I were when we started at Casterbrook,” Stannard says, surprisingly gentle and sly about it - like he knows he’s right, and that Nightingale can have nothing to say in response. “Well!” he says abruptly in the face of Nightingale’s unimpeachable silence, slapping both palms against his knees and leaning forward. “Never you fret, Thomas, I shall keep them well-entertained!” Stannard grins at Lesley and Peter like they’re sharing a secret. For a very old man, he has this air of the naughty little boy about him, like he’s got his hand in the universe’s sweetie jar, and Lesley feels her mouth curving into a matching smile, all slights forgiven. “And what’s more, I shall be a very bad influence about it.”
“That, Jim, I do not doubt,” Nightingale says, filching a pink panther for the road and looking dryly amused. “Just - don’t let them hit each other with croquet mallets, will you.”
Stannard slaps a hand against his chest and holds up three fingers of the other hand. “Scout’s honour,” he says, booming voice ringing as Nightingale turns and heads back towards the house. “Hold a moment,” Stannard suddenly calls, launching himself to his feet with surprising alacrity and bustling across the lawn to where Nightingale has paused, hands in his pockets and one eyebrow raised in elegant interest. They speak lowly for a moment, too quiet to be heard, and Lesley allows her attention to drift.
The lawn is green-gold in the sunlight, hot and fried by the heatwave they’d had the week before and were now suffering only the tail end of. Lesley had spent most of the week lying on the cold marble floor of the Folly’s atrium with Peter and only moving for the occasional schlep to the kitchens for Molly’s lemonade and, if they were lucky, a choc ice. Nightingale, in full black suit, had returned on the Monday red-faced and furious with the heat; he’d immediately disappeared upstairs and not returned until washed, becalmed, and dressed in beige linen trousers and a fresh shirt which made him look a bit like a stereotypical safari guide, or an idle cricketer. He’d sat on the floor with them to ask about their day and glance over the basic Latin exercises he’d taken to leaving for them in case of extreme boredom, but Lesley reckoned he had only really wanted access to the cool marble and they were a good excuse.
But the garden seems to have thrived on the heat: there are half a hundred different insects bumbling and buzzing about in between the flowers and up and down the line of fruit trees bordering one side of the lawn. Beside her, Peter tips his head back, eyes closed, like a sunflower seeking light; his skin goes all rich and deep-toned in the sun, where hers would simply burn all red and blotchy. He seems visibly enriched, like the pungent herbs growing along the sun-hot brick wall beside the steps to the house.
“Well then, lad,” Stannard says, returning to his seat, “how are you and Nightingale rubbing along? Must be odd, being the only young’un in a big house like the Folly.”
Peter glances at Lesley for support. She reckons he’s got out of the habit of fielding well-meaning questions from older relatives when abandoned to them by a parent. “It’s alright,” he manages. “I mean - there’s school, and Lesley comes over a lot, so.”
Stannard nods understandingly, pointing in remembrance. “Yes, of course - the demi-monde is quite abuzz, children, with the pair of you. The Nightingale’s little chicks.” He twinkles merrily at them, and Lesley and Peter try to avoid meeting each other’s gaze. She can’t imagine that the name was Nightingale’s idea. “Funny to think you should be going to a state school, though.”
Peter frowns slightly, bristling. “I wanted to stay at my school,” he says, rather defensively. “I like it there - Nightingale said I didn’t have to change if-”
“Oh, no, dear boy, not at all,” Stannard cuts in quickly, hands out placatingly. “I meant Casterbrook, of course, though I suppose that is a public school of a sort. No, it only seems odd to me that Nightingale hasn’t been teaching you any of the formae - most of the lads could muster a rather wussy little werelight, at least, before they enrolled at the school.”
“We’re learning about vestigia,” Peter says quickly, leaping to Nightingale’s defence - and possibly their own, too. “We’re getting good at it, too.”
“Nearly as good as the dog,” Lesley murmurs, and Peter kicks her under the table. He’s better at picking up vestigia than she is, anyway: he’s more patient, ready to spend a full fifteen minutes scouring every corner of the lab for a trace of magic, whereas Lesley is more inclined to walk straight in, think about it for a bit, and then shrewdly ask Nightingale if this is a trick question. This annoys their competitive instincts in equal measure, not least because - sometimes - Lesley is right.
“Yes, I imagine you are!” Stannard says, delighted. “Young minds, you see, got all that plasticity-nonsense. Old beggars like me couldn’t learn in a year half of what you learn in a week - it’s why us grown-ups get you in school as soon as possible. Here,” he says, leaning forward with his elbows on the table and gesturing for them to do the same. “Let’s play a game, eh? You two close your eyes and I’ll do some little forma, and then you can tell me what it was.”
Lesley glances at Peter, and then they’re both nodding enthusiastically. Magic is brilliant and Nightingale doesn’t show them anything, really. Even with their eyes closed, it’s better than croquet.
Stannard laughs, delighted with their enthusiasm, and then waves his hands slightly. “Go on, go on, eyes closed then. And try to listen out for what I’m doing - hear the shape in your head, hmm? Really concentrate on its form.”
Lesley screws her eyes up and thinks really hard, but she can only feel the slight breeze on her face and hear birds chirping. “The air one?” Peter suggests, but he doesn’t sound at all sure, either.
“Not quite,” Stannard says gently.
“Again,” Lesley insists. And this time, the shape is there - not a real shape, but a sense of a shape. An impression of an image of an idea, but her finger is scraping the edge of it. She’s still not sure what it is Stannard’s doing, so - she opens her eyes.
Stannard grins at her. A pearly, cool ball of light, about the size of a golf ball, is floating over the centre of his palm, and even though Nightingale has shown them werelights hundreds of times now she still gasps slightly. “A wondrous thing,” Stannard pronounces softly, and when Peter’s eyes flutter open too they go wide and shiny with reflected light. “Did you get the shape?” Stannard asks, closing his palm and opening it again to produce a new light, more yellow than the last.
“Lux,” Peter says, reaching out his hand to feel for any heat emitting from the globe.
Stannard hums in agreement, and closes his palm. “Listen again, and then - why don’t you two try it?”
Lesley’s heart does a backflip. At last. She’s wanted to try this ever since Nightingale first showed her a werelight so that she’d stop bugging Peter about saying his new guardian was a wizard, like that was a normal thing to be. He’d never let them try anything - had refused to even repeat a spell too often, in case they picked it up, and preferred to cast with them in another room, like he was worried about second-hand smoke. They knew about the brain damage thing, because Nightingale had quite quickly realised that because I say so was just not going to cut it, but - brain damage, schmrain damage, when you’re eleven.
“But, Nightingale said-” Peter begins, and Stannard offers him a comforting smile.
“I had a word before he went in, never you worry,” he says, holding out his closed fist and nodding for them to do likewise. Lesley does so right away; Peter hesitates only a second, with just one brief, guilty glance at the house. “Lux,” Stannard says.
It takes - well, it takes a lot of attempts. The shape is as slippery as a fish and it leaves them both with empty palms and plenty of frustration more often than not. But Stannard remains ever patient, opening and closing his fist over and over again so that they can listen out for it and try again.
And then - there, above Lesley’s palm, is a tiny, wobbling ball of yellow light. It’s only as big as a marble and its edges are indistinct, like she’s looking at something underwater, but it exists. It’s there.
Stannard claps, delighted, and her concentration buckles. The werelight pops like a bubble and she looks up, aware now of the smile that has taken over her face. “Oh, very well done!” Stannard says, hands clasped over his chest and eyes twinkling with pride.
Peter wrenches his eyes from the empty space over her palm and grins at her with that same friendly competition that’s kept them racing each other up and down the playground since they were four. “Lux,” he tells his opening hand firmly, and then yelps in surprise when a red-tinged ball of light appears. “Nice! Uh, it’s quite hot-?” The light appears to be only getting redder, and Peter is looking increasingly uncomfortable. Lesley can feel the warmth of it from across the table.
“Close your palm,” Stannard says quickly, making some gesture Lesley can’t quite follow and encasing Peter’s werelight in a ball of water until it winks out of existence.
Peter pokes at his singed palm, and then beams triumphantly at Lesley. “Mine was bigger.”
“Mine was better,” she retorts quickly, sticking her tongue out and waving her unblemished palm at him.
“Children,” Stannard chides warmly. “You’ve both done very well. Your lights will stabilise the more you do it - have another go.”
Already, Lesley’s light is less wobbly, and more like a ping-pong ball than a marble; Peter’s is still quite red, for some reason, but it doesn’t seem so hot. “It’s-” Peter begins, enthralled by his light, and then he breaks off and huffs in slight embarrassment. Lesley kicks him under the table until he rolls his eyes and sighs. “Well, it’s - magic, isn’t it?” he says, smiling rather abashedly.
Lesley grins. “Yeah,” she says, “it really is.”
“You’re both naturals, I should say,” Stannard says. And then, back in that tone all gentle and sly: “No need to tell Nightingale right away, hmm? It can be our little secret.”
Lesley and Peter look at each other. This wasn’t exactly what their PSRE classes had been thinking of, probably, when they had gone on about stranger danger, and not keeping secrets from trusted adults. “Alright,” Peter says casually.
“Sure,” Lesley agrees.
They continue opening and closing their palms, conjuring increasingly regular lights, for a few minutes, and then Peter excuses himself to use the loo. Lesley conjures one more werelight, her best and brightest yet, and takes a moment to appreciate it. Its light is yellow and buttery, like her own personal sun, and it floats over her palm like an extension of herself. It feels right that it should sit there.
And then she closes her palm and folds her hands neatly in her lap so that she doesn’t look at all guilty when two croquet hoops go whistling past her ears, one thudding into the tree and the other punching sharply through the tablecloth.
Stannard, one arm pinned to the tree and the other, which had been extended to demonstrate the light again, trapped against the table, gapes towards the house. Lesley twists in her chair, and can’t really blame him. Nightingale looks kind of scary at the best of times: when he’s striding across the lawn with such speed and purpose that Peter is having to jog to remain at his heel, and reaching out to catch the half-metre length of painted wood, sharpened to a serious stake, which he has just magically yanked out of the croquet lawn and sent speeding to his palm, he is in fact quite terrifying.
“Lesley, come here,” Nightingale says sharply and she scurries across the lawn to stand behind him with Peter.
“I was just-” Stannard begins, but Nightingale flicks the fingers of the hand not holding the croquet stake and Stannard winces as the hoop pegging him to the tree tightens slightly.
“I explicitly told you they were too young,” Nightingale says, voice like shards of ice and hand tight around the stake. It’s like, the least dangerous thing about him, and it’s making Lesley’s heart beat twice as fast in fear. “You went behind my back to teach my children against my express wishes, though you knew it was dangerous to do so. You have no safety measures to quench the lights if they got out of control and the children could have been badly burned. And you told them to lie to me.”
Peter shifts to tuck his scorched palm behind his back, though Lesley reckons that hiding that one is a lost battle already. She’s still working through the peculiar note of injured trust and honour in Nightingale’s voice at the very idea that she and Peter should be told not to confide in him.
“They have to learn,” Stannard says, surprisingly firmly for a man in his position; he holds Nightingale’s gaze with quiet determination, all bluster stripped away. “Thomas, you know they have to. You can’t be the only wizard in England forever - even more so now than ever. With the boy in your care you have the perfect opportunity and you may never get a better, things being as they are. After what happened to his parents-”
Nightingale’s fists clench and Stannard breaks off, grimacing in pain as the hoops press into his arms. Lesley shifts her weight casually closer to Peter, and allows her hand to brush against his until his fingers wrap around hers and squeeze tightly. “Be quiet,” Nightingale snaps.
But Stannard is undeterred. “Of course, it was a tragedy - but by ancient rule the boy is yours, Thomas, given to the Folly. The times are changing; the day is growing short. If you die without successor, there will be no Newtonian magic in Britain. None but this-” he gestures dismissively as well as he can with his arms pinned, “-this charlatan you’re hunting. He will be the boy’s legacy, if you don’t teach him the ways. You’ve had him too long, Thomas. You know as well as I do that your man will go for you both. If you want to keep him safe in the times ahead, it is past time he learned to defend himself.”
Nightingale doesn’t say anything for a long moment. When Lesley looks up at his face, a nerve in the corner of his jaw is ticking furiously and his eyes are suddenly deep and internally distant. “Mr. Stannard,” he says eventually, voice tight and angry, “I did not find anything of interest in the course of my search; I thank you for your cooperation, and your time.”
“Thomas,” Stannard says, sounding tired and almost pleading, but Nightingale doesn’t wait to hear it.
“If you should hear of anything that might be of use to the investigation, do get in touch,” he says with icy politeness, and steps forward to remove a card from inside his jacket and place it on the table. Lesley recognises it as the one that directs phone calls to Belgravia, not the Folly; Stannard looks rather distressed about it, like it’s a personal insult. Nightingale places the stakes next to it with a decisive click. Then, he turns on his heel, places his palm on Peter’s shoulder, and steers them all toward the steps. “Come along.” Lesley keeps her hand firmly in Peter’s, although at this point whether it’s more for her or him she couldn’t say.
Nightingale stops by the Jag, collecting them before him with a hand on each of their shoulders so that they’re collected in a little loose, connected triangle and crouches to be closer to their eyes - though they’ve grown enough, now, that they’re a little taller than him when he does so. The gesture has a comforting familiarity, anyway. “I only got a little burned,” Peter blurts out.
“You-? Let me see,” Nightingale says, frowning, though it eases when Peter demonstrates a palm only slightly pinkened. “Hmm. I should say - that is.” Nightingale frowns at the floor, face working slightly as he thinks, and Lesley and Peter exchange a worried look.
“We’re sorry,” Lesley offers. “We didn’t think you’d like it, but he said you said it was fine, and then he said it was a secret, so-”
Nightingale musters a bolstering smile and squeezes her shoulder. “Yes, alright. I was going to say, thank you. For telling me, even though Stannard-” his face clouds over with fury, and then it burns away. “-tried to stop you. You may always come to me with anything at all. And - you shouldn’t keep secrets with grown-ups,” he tacks on, as though he’s read it in some parenting manual.
Peter rolls his eyes. “We know,” he grouses, so overwrought that it makes Nightingale twist his lips against amusement. “We did it in school.”
“I’m sure,” Nightingale says, sounding gently, fondly amused - like Peter’s preteen grouchiness is endearing, not infuriating like Lesley’s parents seem to think.
Peter ducks his head slightly, and Lesley can see him chew his lower lip slightly. He always does, when he’s deciding something. He tips his head up, staring Nightingale straight in the eye with a set determination in his face and his hand tight around Lesley’s. “What did he mean,” he says firmly, “the times ahead? What’s going on that you haven’t told me about?”
Nightingale holds his gaze for a long moment, face unreadable, and then he glances at Lesley and fixes his gaze on the floor. “Four years ago,” he says, eyes eventually flickering back to their level and lingering on Peter, “there was a… woman. She and her - sisters, they said, were unusual; they had been alive for nearly sixty years without aging, and had not precisely… noticed.”
Peter drums his fingers against her knuckles, and she squeezes his hand. She has this awful feeling about where this is going. It isn’t like Nightingale to be hesitant.
“They were feeding on the energy, or, or the magic, of the people around them,” Nightingale says, brow slightly furrowed in a way that says he’s still working things out, like when he does battle with the TV remote in the coach house. “They didn’t know they were doing it, I think. But - you recall the brain scans Dr. Walid showed you?” Lesley and Peter nod. “The effect was similar, and the victims died. The women, they had a preference for - for jazz musicians.”
Peter goes stiff all over, holding Lesley’s hand so tightly that it hurts. Dread settles like heavy, skeletal hands upon her shoulders.
Nightingale looks beseechingly apologetic, but he perseveres. “This woman met with your father, Peter, in the sixties and then again four years ago. She - accidentally - caused his death.”
“I know this,” Peter says, quiet and hard, and Nightingale nods. Lesley doesn’t want to imagine that conversation - it must have been years ago, when they didn’t know each other so well and weren’t quite - friends. Or whatever they are now.
“Yes, I know. At the same time, however, I became aware of another practitioner operating in Britain, with rather less scrupulous morals than one might like.”
That was Nightingale-speak for evil. “But I thought you were the only one,” she says.
He tilts his head slightly. “Say rather, hoped. I do not enjoy being the very last man in the Folly, but if this…man is the alternative-” Nightingale breaks off, lips twisting in distaste, and Lesley can’t help being horribly, morbidly curious about what the other magician did. “This man,” Nightingale says, collecting himself and resuming his narrative, “was seeking the woman to recruit her to his service. She realised what she had done to her victims, and refused. Peter’s mother was - caught in the crossfire. I was too late.”
There are birds chirping overhead. It feels so horrible she could kill them all to make them stop, as they stand here in the echo of those words.
“In extremis, Mrs. Grant called upon certain - contracts,” Nightingale continues, “to protect Peter. A tynged was placed upon the Protectors of the Land to care for you. There was - debate, at the time, surrounding the possibility that she had meant the Rivers, the orisha, but-”
“I remember,” Peter says. “The room smelled of plantain, and everyone was arguing, but I - couldn’t stay.”
“The tynged was clear,” Nightingale says. “Whatever was meant, the Protectors of the Land, those kings asleep under the mountain, they were invoked. Arthur, Thomas, Bran and Merlin and Drake, all those who lie sleeping in their hill forts and barrows until needed. And historically, in their stead, the descendants of Merlin were called to answer to their tyngeds - and since its conception, the Folly has taken on the duty.”
“By rights, Stannard said,” Peter says. “By rights, I am - yours.”
“Mm,” Nightingale confirms with a dip of his head. “A tynged is a duty that may not be shirked. And Stannard would have me train you, because he sees it as an obligation on your part, too, that you become a practitioner and rebuild the Folly.”
“To help you fight this rogue guy,” Lesley prompts.
Nightingale inclines his head gracefully. “Indeed.”
Lesley finds she doesn’t entirely like the idea of a man Nightingale might need help to defeat.
“I want to,” Peter says abruptly. His face is all set, still, but in that determined, certain way of his that has a tendency to bulldoze through any problems or setbacks. “I want to be a practitioner, and I want to help you.”
Nightingale offers him a very small, sad smile and reaches up to stroke his palm over Peter’s hair before settling on his shoulder again. “You don’t have to,” he says gently. “I’ll be alright. You can do whatever you like, Peter. I promise.”
“I want to,” Peter says again, more doggedly, and gestures at Lesley. “Lesley wants to, too.”
Lesley nods sharply, trying to look similarly determined and decided. Nightingale looks between them, mouth curving into a slight smile. “Let’s - let’s get through secondary school first, shall we?” he says - but he doesn’t say no. He just shifts on his heels, gives their shoulders a squeeze, and makes to stand.
Abruptly, Peter puts out his hand to stay the motion. “Wait,” he says, and then looks hopefully at Lesley. She shrugs, and lets his hand go.
“Lux.”
Nightingale huffs and sits back on his heels, two lights - one pinkish, one yellow - reflected in his wide eyes. There’s a smile playing at the corner of his mouth, despite everything he’s said, and Peter grins at Lesley. “I should have bloody known,” Nightingale says wryly, “that the pair of you would be prodigies. I sometimes think the universe only created you to give me grey hairs.” But his voice is all light and smiling, so Lesley doesn’t hide her grin when Peter cackles with delight - because Nightingale doesn’t sound upset about that at all.
He sounds pretty damn proud, actually.
“So,” Peter says, kicking his heels against the floor and leaning back against the wall, “d’you reckon something’s happened recently to make him worried, or that he’s hoping we’ll chicken out of it in favour of our GSCEs?”
“If it’s the latter,” Lesley points out, folding her arms, “he’s an idiot. Who’d pick English Lit over magic?”
Peter shoots her a slightly chiding look. “I do actually want to become an architect, you remember,” he says, and Lesley shrugs. Nightingale, full of pride in his charge and entirely confident in his abilities, has always said that Peter can be exactly whatever he pleases, and can be both apprentice and engineer - Penrose steps, here we come. Lesley reckons that training, Hendon, and the Folly ought to be more than enough.
“Exactly. Himself wants you as the next sculptural wunderkind of office blocks, so he’d only risk your GCSEs if it was important. He’s been saying after secondary school for ages - something’s happened, and he doesn’t like it.”
Peter makes an unhappy face - but resigned, like he’d thought so too and had only hoped that Lesley might talk him out of it. There’s a surge of noise from behind the door next to them, an argumentative wave cresting and breaking, and by the time they’ve ceased being distracted by it there’s a little girl looking at them both curiously. Lesley has literally no idea where she’s spawned from, and she’s weirdly terrifying for a nine-year-old with her hair in puffballs. It’s something about the intense expression, maybe, like it’s a dam for a whole glacial reservoir of power.
Peter offers her a small wave. “Hey.”
The girl tilts her head on one side and smiles, bright and sparkly like sunbeams on a stream. “Hi! I’m Nicky. Are you staying?”
And it’s so bright and charming and cheerful that Lesley is halfway to saying yes before her brain has even thought about it. The kid is just - endearing, like a fun little sister. But one from a book, not from real life; Lesley hasn’t found her real sisters endearing once. The wrong note of it jars - and then Nicky’s just a normal girl.
Peter shakes himself visibly, and Lesley guesses this is just another weirdness for them to encounter, understand, and get used to. “No, we’re-”
“Nicky, come away from the Isaacs,” another voice says, and a pretty girl about their age rounds the corner, chewing gum and looking unimpressed. Peter’s eyes linger on her, Lesley notices; she notices, too, that all the girl’s clothes are new and sharp in that effortlessly cool way that comes with having a real vision of how you want to look and the money enough to pull it off. She tosses her dreads over one shoulder and looks Lesley and Peter over, mouth curving like she hasn’t yet fully decided on disdain, but could be convinced either way.
The kid - Nicky - frowns at them. “They don’t look like Isaacs,” she says.
“No,” the other girl says, watching Peter watch her - and then she smirks, smug and proud at how his gaze sticks on her. “Who knew they could be cute?”
“I’m Peter,” he blurts out and, safely out of his attention, Lesley rolls her eyes. The girl catches the motion and her grin turns a bit more genuinely amused.
“The Nightingale’s chick, I know,” she says. “And you must be Lesley - new wizards on the block, huh? I’m Beverley, this is my sister Nicky.”
“Neckinger, right?” Peter says, holding his hand out; Nicky scampers over, places her hand in his, and performs a neat curtsey. Beverley grins at Nicky, shaking her head with fond amusement in a way that softens her cat-like eyes and makes a pretty, glossy bow of her mouth.
“And you’re the Beverley Brook,” Lesley cuts in before Peter can like, actively start drooling. Boys. Besides, it’s not a massive leap at this point - they’re in the house of Mama Thames so that Nightingale can talk to all the rivers about taking on more apprentices, so all the rivers must be here. Beverley and Nicky aren’t exactly what she had imagined, being kids and all, but it’s also hardly the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to her. She talked to a fox behind the chippy last week, Peter keeps getting distracted mid-werelight and setting fire to the lab, and Beverley is a river goddess. Puberty takes everyone differently.
Beverley spreads her hands and smiles. “The one and only.” And then none of them really know what to say, like they’ve been abandoned together at a wedding by their parents with the expectation that they’ll automatically have loads in common on account of all being fifteen at the same time. There’s a kind of solidarity to it whenever the noise in the inner sanctum gets louder and they all exchange looks of ugh, our magical grown-ups are soooo embarrassing, but mostly they just - hang around. Peter goes back to scuffing his feet, sneaking admiring looks at Bev; Bev checks her nails and resolutely ignores him; Lesley jams her hands in her pockets and wishes that she had her phone with her. She’s not risking it around the magic, though. Peter had persuaded Nightingale that all the kids in secondary school needed smartphones in order to function pretty early on - he’d got a Nokia for his twelfth birthday, and Lesley had been seethingly jealous until they both realised that texting, phoning and having social media does, in fact, require your mate to have a phone too. Until she was thirteen, and her Uncle Charlie had upgraded from his iPhone 4 to the latest model and passed the old phone down to her, Peter’s phone had essentially been a shiny paperweight. But she still reckons he could get a new one quicker than her, if it got accidentally fried.
“You two go to school out in Peckham, yeah?” Bev offers eventually. “GCSEs, huh.”
“Yeah,” Lesley agrees, non-committal. What’s there to say? GCSEs - they exist, they’re all doing ‘em. “Of Mice and Men sucks, right?”
Bev shrugs. “We’re doing Romeo and Juliet.” Peter’s eyes go all moon-like and shiny, despite previously professing serious disinterest in the Bard and any tweenagers poisoning themselves for fun. Nicky pulls a bored face, and Lesley internally agrees.
Finally, the door to Mama Thames’ court opens with a gust of sweet, warm smells like cooking and home but not her home - not the Folly either, but Peter’s first home and Mrs. Grant’s cooking. Peter turns into the scent like a cartoon bloodhound but something in him pulls away, like there’s a physical wall between him and the threshold, although Bev and Nicky can slip through and in amongst their sisters easily enough.
“The agreement holds,” a musical, warm voice pronounces from within, and Nightingale steps out through the doorway.
He turns to make a half-bow to those inside. “It does. Thank you, Mama Thames.” And then the door swings closed and his pristine posture slumps briefly out of him on a relieved sigh, before he straightens and turns to smile at them.
“Did it go well,” Peter is asking, Beverley forgotten for now. But it’s obvious in the set of Nightingale’s shoulders and the curve of his grin and the looseness of the grip on his cane. Lesley waits for him to say it anyway.
“Peter Grant and Lesley May,” he announces, holding his cane neatly before him with the point between his toes like an Arthurian sword, “where would you like to have your first dinner as official apprentices of the Folly?”
They end up in an Israeli place in Kingly Court that Nightingale had heard about, somehow - Lesley reckons he has some kind of secret network of informers to keep him up-to-date on the London food scene, because she has definitely never seen him looking anything up online. He had looked, if anything, less keen to eat there when Peter had told him the place’s Instagram page looked good, but they had struggled through Nightingale’s horror and incomprehension of that world immaterial and settled around a steel table, Lesley and Peter side-by-side on a bench and Nightingale opposite in a teal metal chair.
“So,” Peter says once their table is laden with food but without any further preamble, “what’s gone horribly wrong now to make you start our training early?”
“It’s not very early,” Nightingale demurs, industriously mixing his shakshuka with a fork to avoid looking at them.
Peter makes a doubtful noise. “Two years,” he counters. “After secondary school was always the deal, and me and Lesley-”
“Lesley and I,” Nightingale says - it’s probably instinctual at this point, and has as little effect as ever.
“-haven’t even started Year Eleven, yet,” Peter says. “So what’s happened? Are you in danger, or something?”
“No,” Nightingale says quickly, but firmly, his eyes snapping up to meet Peter’s. Peter shifts slightly in his chair but maintains the gaze, leeching comfort from its steadiness. “No more or less than usual, that is,” he adds, turning his steadying look on Lesley; she takes a bite of her sabih to avoid the awkward prickling of being seen to be worried. “But you recall those missing girls on the radio, over the summer?”
They both nod. Even if it hadn’t been the only thing any grown-ups would talk about for at least a fortnight, Nightingale had been forced to drive down and check it out. Lesley’s mum had insisted that Peter couldn’t stay in the Folly with just a housekeeper for company, so they’d all apologised profusely to Molly and he’d moved in with them for a few nights. Even though Tanya’s moved out, now, it had not been the most spacious or successful instance of cohabitation, and everyone had been extremely relieved for all sorts of reasons to hear of the girls returned home safely and Nightingale on his way to take Peter back to the Folly.
Also, obviously: “When they were kidnapped by faeries,” Lesley says, with maybe a bit too much relish - Nightingale sends her a mildly chiding look.
“Quite,” he says dryly. “Well, it occurred to me then that you two aren’t an awful lot older than those girls. Whilst I like to think that you wouldn’t go running off after unicorns in the middle of the night-”
Peter and Lesley make twin scoffing noises. Of course not - they aren’t children.
“-it is true that I have introduced you both to a world that may be dangerous and strange, and I did not like to think of you going into it - unarmed, if you will.” Nightingale says all of this so calmly and levelly that it’s kind of hard to see how...taut he is. He’s holding his fork a little too tightly, knuckles white, and he keeps his gaze strictly on his food. It occurs to Lesley, then, that she’d been too busy being annoyed at having her parents, sisters, and also Peter underfoot that if she’d thought about the search for the girls at all it had only been to briefly and absently hope they were recovered soon. She hadn’t thought about Nightingale, out in the sticks on his own, looking for kids who must have reminded him at every turn of his own charge, and then finding them lost in the very same magical half-world he had brought Peter and Lesley into.
“So you went to talk to the Rivers?” Peter asks.
Nightingale nods, pushing some egg neatly onto a piece of pita and folding it into his mouth. “It was a good time to do so, as well,” he says, as though that might mitigate the obvious and terrible fear that Lesley knows in her bones was the real impetus. “The local Rivers helped to find the children and word amongst them always spreads quickly, so there was some sympathy already.”
“It didn’t sound like it,” Lesley points out, pulling some fried aubergine out of her sabih and trading it for a piece of Peter’s challah.
Nightingale tilts his head in concession. “Mama Thames fosters a - healthy spirit of discussion amongst her children, however much hers is the final say,” he says, which sounds very diplomatic considering the shouting. “The Lady Tyburn has never liked me very much, I fear.”
Peter frowns at that, like he’s personally riled that anyone would not like Nightingale. Lesley wants to laugh at him for it, but she does also kind of agree. Nightingale, like all dad-adjacent persons everywhere, is not cool, but he is theirs to consider uncool - where does Tyburn get off, not liking Nightingale? “Why does she get to be the Lady Tyburn, anyway?” Lesley says, with every good Brit’s disdain for hereditary nobility.
“I don’t like to ask,” Nightingale says, gently amused. “But it seems that having children of her own has not precisely made her more sympathetic to the idea of your training.”
Peter pulls a face. “Well, her kids are, like, two, or something. So teaching them magic is probably not on her radar. If they were more like Beverley, then maybe.” Then he goes brick red and puts a large amount of challah in his mouth.
Nightingale blinks, then frowns. “Beverley Brook? Oh - yes, I suppose she would be about your age. In a sense. Did you meet her?”
Peter nods. “She was very nice,” he blurts out before attacking his dinner with enthusiasm and refusing to look up.
Lesley rolls her eyes with enough force to shake the room and shakes her head, unable to keep a disgusted, jealous look off her face. Beverley Brook can shove off - Lesley’s been friends with Peter for years, and she’s not about to be set aside for some scary goddess with cool shirts that Lesley’s dad would never let her wear.
Nightingale looks from one youth to the other, appearing both alarmed and bewildered by this incomprehensible display of interpersonal teenage-ness. And then his eyes narrow slightly, and it looks like he’s doing about seventeen mental recalculations - about god knows what, but probably including and not limited to: Peter’s age and interests, what hanging out with kids their own age means now that they’re no longer seven, and Lesley’s relationship to Peter. He must go wrong on that last one, though, because he looks at her with a horrible sort of sympathy, and it’s not-
It isn’t-
It’s not like that, her and Peter. She’s jealous for totally normal and very friendly reasons.
She takes a large and vicious bite of her sabih and glares at Nightingale over it, daring him to say anything. The man is wise; he lets it go.
“Well, I’m glad,” he says neutrally. “It would be somewhat difficult if Miss Brook decided to dislike you. Flood damage and such, you know.”
Peter looks up, eyes all wide and admiring. “She can do that?”
Nightingale tilts his head. “She can,” he allows, “but her mother would point out that she may not. But given that you could drive anyone to distraction, Peter, I’m not sure how much sway that would hold.”
Peter gapes and makes vague protesting noises, Beverley Brook forgotten in a wash of injured honour, and Lesley has to laugh. Nightingale glances over at her around another mouthful of bread and eggs and offers her a flash of a smile and a wink. She’s trying quite hard not to be mollified, because she isn’t jealous, but. There’s just something so delightfully warming about being in league with Nightingale - though he’d probably call it cahoots, because he grew up in a Just William book. Still. It’s nice.
“It is,” Peter announces, “so unfair that Beverley gets to just have magical powers. I have to wait for you to teach me how to annoy you before I get to do it.”
“Well, that is - not entirely the point of your apprenticeship,” Nightingale says, rethinking halfway through the statement, “though it certainly is a step in that direction.” He looks thoughtful, in a not-very-serious way. “Put like that, I begin to see the Lady Tyburn’s point.”
“Maybe she was thinking of her toddlers,” Lesley offers. “Who wants to give a two-year-old more opportunities to make a mess.”
Nightingale raises his eyebrows briefly around a sip of his water. Lesley has no idea what Nightingale thinks about babies and toddlers: whether he likes them, hates them, has barely any idea that they exist. He’s been a good parent-figure to Peter over the years, though. She wonders, briefly, if it would have been easier for all of them if Nightingale had taken Peter when he and she were both too young to know any different.
“But that’s unfair too,” Peter says, biting his lip against a grin. “Those Tyburn toddlers are gonna be able to get up to all sorts when they’re at school or whatever, ‘cause only their mum’s going to be able to stop them. Even you’ve got it better than me,” he says, gesturing at Lesley.
“What,” she says, leaning one elbow on the table and propping her chin in her palm as she turns to him, “‘cause the second I managed a werelight I became, like, a thousand times more magically-powered than anyone else in my family?”
“Yeah!” Peter says, grin escaping at the edges; Lesley shifts her fingers to mask her own smile. “You can go all Magic Finger and start zapping them if they get annoying,” he adds, wiggling his index finger in a way that would be menacing if it were pretty much any other gesture.
Lesley grins. And then, because they’re less than two hours into their official apprenticeship and Nightingale already looks like he is slightly regretting it, she says firmly and clearly and in a rather put-upon tone: “I am not going to zap any members of my family even if they’re annoying. With great power, etcetera etcetera.”
Nightingale looks slightly comforted, and slightly blank. “How has Spider-Man passed you by,” Peter says, sounding preemptively exhausted - they suffer through some variation on this conversation a lot. “It first came out a billion years ago and they’ve been remaking it ever since.”
Nightingale looks at Peter, clearly weighing up his responses. Lesley wouldn’t be totally surprised if he’s run out of new answers - Nightingale has been doing something, presumably, for the past seventy-odd years since the war, but evidently it has not involved keeping his finger on the pulse of popular culture. “Lesley,” he settles on, turning away from Peter as though he hadn’t said anything at all. “I had meant to ask - what with formal training, I will need you to spend more time at the Folly, either after school or at the weekend. Will your parents mind losing you? I should hate to reduce the time that you have with your family any more-”
But Lesley is already shaking her head, face scrunched in doubt at the very idea. “Would have to notice first, wouldn’t they?” she says with a shrug, reaching out and picking up a paper napkin to fuss between her fingers. “It’ll be fine.”
Nightingale frowns, looking hurt at the very idea - maybe it’s parental solidarity, or something. “I am certain,” he says crisply, “that your parents would notice if you failed to come home from school of an afternoon.”
Lesley shrugs again, helpless and hopeless but pretty sure she’s right. “There’s loads of us kids and we’re in and out all the time. They’d probably notice if I didn’t come home for like a week straight, but then they’d just be a bit cross for a day or two because they didn’t notice earlier, and then it’d be fine again. Besides, I’m round yours most days anyway. It’s been fine so far.”
Nightingale looks faintly scandalised as he considers this point. It seems to have genuinely never occurred to him that Lesley spends at least half of her free time in a week at the Folly, doing homework in the library with Peter or destroying him at Mortal Kombat and Mario Kart in the coach house. Maybe it just snuck up on him, how his house was a kind of home to more than one kid.
Lesley is filled by the sudden and terrible fear that, now that he has noticed, he will mind.
“Surely,” Nightingale begins, but then stops. He looks at Peter, like he’s going to somehow refute it, but Peter just tilts one hand from side to side, looking awkward. He’s always been rather - conscious - of being an only child around Lesley, especially when Nightingale does something for him which her parents would never do, or be able to do, for her. Like leaving work early to pick him up from school, or buying all his clothes new, or half a hundred other things Nightingale does because Peter is and always has been his first priority.
“Lesley,” Nightingale says gently, awkwardly, like he’s navigating an unfamiliar room with a nervous cat in it and all the lights have been suddenly turned off. “If you want to be at home more often, then-”
“Obviously I don’t, though,” she says quickly before he can throw her out. “Or I would. So.”
There is a long pause; Lesley keeps her eyes on her hands, and the growing pile of napkin shreds which her fingers have been anxiously, compulsively producing. “Well,” Nightingale says at last, voice so quiet as to be barely audible under the ambient noise of the restaurant and the busy square outside. “As long as you are happy.”
Peter slides along the bench slightly to shove his shoulder into her side, and something inside her unlocks and settles - like a forma turning over in the mind. She manages a smile for him, and treasures his answering warmth, the familiar shape of him at her side, the impending joy of learning magic with Peter and Nightingale.
She tries not to feel like she’s clinging to their coattails.
Lesley sits without ceremony on the cold grass. She’s probably going to get a wet arse, maybe muddy too, but she’s pretty confident of a lift home. “Alright,” she says, tucking her knees up and propping her elbows on them.
“They’ll take you as a police officer,” Peter says, “if you can prove that you can speak another language. No other qualifications needed or anything.” He does this, when he really doesn’t want to talk about something - loudly starts on another subject, as if no-one would notice. She reckons he’s picked it up from Nightingale, and though their mentor is about a thousand times more effective at allowing certain conversations to slide off his back like water off a duck, it is one of the less annoying things Peter and Nightingale have taught each other over the years.
“Oh yeah?” she says, frowning at the sad triangle of grass before them. It’s been churned up into mud by the start of the winter weather and the hordes of kids with footballs which descend upon it come three thirty, regular as clockwork. Footie at the rec has been a tradition since time immemorial; gazing upon the space now, at the insurmountable remove of about five years, Lesley views the mud with a certain patriotic pride. “Reckon they’d take me with Latin?”
Peter sniffs. “You have to regularly prove you can use it, though. I don’t know if you can caution the suspect in Latin - they’d prefer, like, Gujarati, or something.”
“Habes ius silere, punk,” Lesley says, pulling her hoodie sleeves down to cover her hands and folding her arms for warmth. If Peter’s been out here all afternoon, and she kind of suspects he has, he must be freezing his tits off. “‘S probably how Nightingale got in, back in the day. His sterling knowledge of Gujarati.”
“You think he knows Gujarati?” Peter says, tilting his head towards her for the first time in curiosity.
Lesley shrugs. “Sure. Pip pip, Mister Commissioner,” she says in an overwrought Wooster-ish accent which is a bit overdone, even for Nightingale. “I’m just in orf the Front, what - all that time with Gurkhas, and whoever else we’ve colonised, and you know what I picked up? Pop me in at DCI, there’s a good chap.”
“The Gurkhas don’t speak Gujarati,” Peter points out, but he is now smiling slightly. So, a win.
Lesley nods in his direction, unwilling to unspool her arms and lose any more warmth. “That what you and him argued about, then? Himself’s putting Gujarati on the curriculum to push you into Hendon?”
Peter winces, but Lesley keeps her eyes harsh and steady on him. He always squirms under it, but just straight-up forcing him to talk about his feelings is literally the only way to get anything out of him.
This is one of the more annoying things Peter and Nightingale have instilled in each other.
“Not exactly,” Peter says at last. And then abruptly he stands up and wanders a few paces across the grass; Lesley just sits, and waits. “You know he’s happy with the whole architect plan,” Peter says, waving vaguely behind him in her direction but not turning. She hums her acknowledgement, since he can’t see her nod. “But - my marks are. Maybe not good enough for it.”
Lesley grimaces behind his back. Marks are always awkward - their great undiscussed elephant. She only wants to get into Hendon and she’s on track to do that, so she’s not so worried. Her parents only press at her to make sure she’s doing some homework and revision.
But Peter wants to be an architect, and Nightingale wants Peter to do every single thing he wants to do, and Peter isn’t really getting the grades for it. Evenings at the Folly are getting tenser, Lesley has noticed; she can (and guiltily does) escape home with the excuse of her own schoolwork so as to avoid the increasingly taut, thrumming atmosphere that develops whenever Nightingale asks after their day at school, or what they’ll be up to this evening, or even how their Latin and magical education is coming along. Peter and Nightingale have to live with it, all the time.
“He said something about maybe getting me a tutor,” Peter says, digging the toe of his trainer into the field, and Lesley tilts her head in consideration. Might not be a bad idea - bit of extra learning, boost his grades, get into uni, profit, or whatever. “And not being his apprentice anymore.”
“Oof,” Lesley says succinctly. Yeah, that’d be why Peter is not looking as stoked about the tutor idea as he could be. Peter loves magic in a way that Lesley doesn’t, really - it’s cool, but if it was magic or Hendon she’d hang up her pointy hat with some regret. She’s not even sure Nightingale loves it like Peter does: he’s had it too long, she reckons. It’d be like loving your own right arm. But Peter really loves it, more than pretty much anything else, and it is so unfair that he has to choose one or the other.
However.
“You know he’s probably right, though,” Lesley points out, tugging her hood up over her head with a shiver. “Other kids aren’t doing their A-Levels and also learning Latin and impello and that. I know you don’t want to choose, but like. Maybe something’s got to give, you know?”
Peter heaves a great sigh as he turns to her, and puts his face up to the steely grey sky. November has come upon them harsh and bitter, with heavy angry clouds scudding at speed on sharp winds overhead, and everything is dull, washed-out, and grey. Lesley hugs her arms more tightly around herself, and watches Peter rage against the vagaries of the universe.
“I know,” he says, sounding weighed-down and grown-up and sad. “But I don’t want to choose. I don’t even think I can. It feels like-” he breaks off to gesture futilely at the recreation ground, site of defeats and victories past, familiar in its dull normality. “It feels like I have to choose: demi-monde, or normal life. I can have magic, or I can be an architect. And I have to make this massive choice now, when I’m seventeen and have literally no fucking idea what I’m doing with my life next week, let alone where I see myself in five years. And I don’t think I can make that choice. It’s like I’m-” he swallows hard, turning away and staring at the floor. “It’s like I’m choosing,” he says, picking his words with deliberate, slow care, “a life with Nightingale and nothing else, or one with everything and not him.”
Lesley closes her eyes briefly against that. God. Maybe Nightingale had been right all along, and they shouldn’t have ever learned magic, because this sucks. Sure, Peter could come back to magic later - but he doesn’t want to do that, either. That’s just choosing not-magic and pretending to postpone the decision. They know, too, that things in the London demi-monde are getting weird and scary, even for Nightingale - and Nightingale is the only wizard left. Peter and Lesley are kind of obliged, aren’t they, to keep going; to stop the slow, inexorable death of Newtonian magic in Britain. But at the same time, they’re still kids. This isn’t a young-adult apocalypse novel - that’s a massive weight to put on them, and Nightingale wouldn’t dream of doing it. They don’t deserve to have their lives planned out as the last stopgap before the end of days, or whatever. Peter deserves to be an architect, if he wants.
It might not be so very bad to be Nightingale’s only apprentice, though. Lesley tries very hard to unthink that.
“So he suggested Hendon,” she guesses, and Peter nods.
“If it’s good enough for Lesley May,” he says, aiming for lightness but lacking some lustre. She spreads her hands in a what can you do, I’m just very wise gesture, and he manages a grin. “It would be - easier,” he says, settling back into his existential gloom. “The demands aren’t so high, it’d be easier for him to train us ‘cause we’d get co-opted into his unit-”
“You could carpool to work,” Lesley adds, amused, as she folds her hands back into her sleeves and tucks them away in her hoodie pocket.
Peter slumps with exaggerated upset, but he’s smiling a bit. “It’d be take your kid to work day every day. I’d be a nepotism hire. I can’t do it.”
“You should have told him about the nepotism thing,” Lesley suggests. “He’d hate that.”
Peter points at her. “That’s a good point. I can shame him out of meddling with ethics.”
“I am guessing,” she replies, sideways and cutting at the heart of the matter, “that that isn’t what you actually did earlier.”
“No,” Peter says, eyes abruptly glued to the mud again in awkward shame. “That is not actually what I did earlier.”
She waits. She can be patient, even if her arse is freezing.
“I might have. Yelled at him. A bit,” Peter offers eventually. “He did some yelling too,” he adds, as though this is a mitigating statement and not, in fact, evidence that Nightingale was seriously upset. Lesley doesn’t think she’s ever heard Nightingale actually shout at someone, unless he was very far away from the other person or said person was a rugby ref and safely ensconced in the telly. “It may have involved,” Peter continues, sounding like he would prefer being swallowed up by the mud beneath him over continuing this conversation, “him suggesting that I wasn’t mature enough to do magic anyway. And me suggesting that he could take that suggestion and shove it. And that I would ask the Rivers to teach me if he didn’t.” Peter says this last bit very very quickly.
“Oh, Peter, you didn’t,” Lesley says, incredulous in despair. Peter grimaces with his whole body. If this is Peter’s sanitised, paraphrased version of the argument, Lesley dreads to think what the full one was like. She sort of knows already anyway - Nightingale had called her at three to ask if she’d seen Peter, as they had had “a disagreement” over lunch and he’d been unable to reach Peter in the intervening two and a half hours. He had not sounded very relaxed about it. So she’d walked out to Peckham, and the rec, because she’d guessed that Peter would be here and that Nightingale wouldn’t have looked. But she hadn’t imagined-
“So, to clarify,” she says, watching Peter wince and hunch in on himself, “you had a massive argument with Nightingale which ended up with him worried that you weren’t being sensible and careful, and then you explicitly told him that you aren’t sensible or careful by declaring an intention to hurl yourself into a river and let the scary goddesses work your future out, and then you ran out and vanished on him and never once picked up your phone.”
“I actually slightly fried the phone.”
“Oh, good.”
Peter looks rather abashed at the sharpness of her tone. “Is he very angry with me?” he says quietly, chewing his lower lip.
Lesley sighs. “Scared, I think,” she diagnoses, and Peter cringes again in shame. “He thought you were in danger,” she says gently, “and he didn’t know where you were. I mean - I was worried, when Nightingale called me.”
Peter’s face softens and he strides across the grass to collapse at her side like a leggy, clumsy puppy and wrap her up in a huge hug. She makes objecting noises as he crushes her and acknowledges her care for him, but submits without wriggling out. It’s easy to lean into him and wrap her fingers in the sleeve of his jacket, and not think about how - in a few years - they’ll be going in different directions for the first time in their lives.
“Lend us your phone, then,” Peter says eventually, leaning back enough to let her wriggle her phone out of her pocket but cuddling back in as she brings up Nightingale’s number and calls it, the phone held carefully between their pressed-together heads. Lesley doesn’t mind - it really is warmer like this.
Nightingale usually takes at least five rings to pick up his mobile. Ring one: he is confused by the noise. Two: he identifies it as a mobile phone, and is annoyed at hearing it. Three: still annoyed. Four: he works out that it might be his own phone, and is yet more annoyed. Five: he finds the phone, squints at the screen, and jabs at it a bit until it picks up.
So it is something of a surprise to hear just one ring, and then a click, and then Nightingale himself, all worried and clipped, saying: “Lesley?”
Peter makes a face briefly. “Uh, hello. It’s me.”
“Peter?” Nightingale’s voice is tinny and sharp and frightened. “Are you alright? Are you hurt?”
“No, no, I’m fine,” Peter says quickly, looking unimaginably guilty. Lesley gets that. She feels bad just for not finding Peter earlier. “I’m fine, I promise.”
There is a long silence on the other end of the line. Lesley can imagine, all too easily, Nightingale taking the phone from his ear to press it against his chest, tilt his head back with his eyes tightly closed, and breathe deeply from the tips of his toes to the top of his head. They had seen him do that, once, with the Folly phone when a nice officer he works with sometimes, Guleed, had ended up in a collapsed Underground station for a few hours, status unknown, and when Stephanopoulos had called to say she was out safely Nightingale had been careful not to let them hear his relief.
She can only imagine how relieved he must be now.
“That is good to hear,” he says eventually, all posh and impersonal, and Lesley chews the tip of her thumb. Peter looks nervous, like he thinks this means Nightingale is still furious, but Lesley reckons he’s just being careful with his bone-deep love for Peter - as if expressing it might scare Peter away or cause another argument. You know, because Nightingale is an idiot. “Where are - that is, you don’t have to tell-”
“Peckham rec,” Peter says quickly, and Lesley can almost hear Nightingale nod sharply.
“Would you like me to swing by and collect you?” Nightingale asks politely, and if he isn’t already in the Jag then Lesley will eat her hoodie. “Or will you make your own way back to the Folly - or to Lesley’s, wherever you’d like.”
Peter scratches his head, pushing into Lesley’s side a little more. “Can you come and pick us up, please?”
“Of course,” Nightingale says immediately, sounding a little more like himself. It’s funny to think what a precise handle she has, now, on the different levels of posh Nightingale can do depending on his mood. And to think that this level of posh, on him, now reads to her as normal. “I won’t be a minute.”
“Alright, see you,” Peter says, and then the line clicks off. “He’s going to kill me,” he says conversationally.
“Worse,” Lesley says, “he’s going to hug you.”
Peter makes all sorts of scoffing noises, but - when the Jag hoves into view way earlier than Lesley had expected what with traffic and the existence of legal speed limits, and Nightingale emerges from it not quite at a run but certainly not slowly, and Peter hurtles awkwardly to his feet, wiping his hands nervously on his jeans - Lesley finds that it is rather pleasing to be right.
Nightingale waits only long enough to hold Peter by the shoulders and look him over; satisfied at the lack of obvious injury, he hauls the lad in and crushes him to his chest. They’re much of a height, now, but as Peter’s arms come up to clutch at Nightingale’s shoulder-blades he tucks his head slightly so that he looks smaller. Younger. More like a kid again. Nightingale’s hand comes up to cradle the back of his head gently, stroking comfort into the fine hairs at the nape of his neck, and he lifts his chin to settle over Peter’s head in a sort of protective, shielding gesture. They stand in silence for a while, clinging. It takes a while for Nightingale’s eyes to even open and seek Lesley out, and when he sees her watching them he still does not let go, embarrassed, as she had thought he might. Instead, he grins at her, all broad and bright and relieved like she’s never seen him, and she basks in the warmth of his love for Peter - and in the warmth of what refracts through Peter, like a prism, and remains for her.
“Thomas rang,” her mum says when she gets home much later after a rather massive dinner at the Folly - Lesley suspects that Molly intends to persuade Peter to stay forever by feeding him as much good food as possible so that he won’t want to leave, and also won’t be able to fit out of the door. “He asked if Peter had been ‘round. Did you find him, in the end?”
“Yeah,” Lesley says, lingering in the kitchen doorway to give her mum a reassuring smile. “Exam stress, you know.”
Her mum nods, smiling in indulgent understanding. Then she sobers slightly and reaches out to squeeze Lesley’s hand. “You’re not too stressed, are you love? You know you can tell me anything.”
Lesley turns her palm to take her mum’s hand, and allows herself to imagine it. She could tell her parents everything: there’s magic and I can do it; and the world is more amazing and terrifying than I ever knew; and the fate of British magic is kind of on my shoulders; and I’m scared. I’m scared of losing Peter to being an architect, and I’m scared of being a grown-up, properly, even though I feel like all this magic shit has made me more than grown-up already, and I’m scared of losing you to the magic. I’m scared that I maybe don’t mind that enough - that I want magic enough to let you go. That it’s a whole half of my life that I’ve never told you about. That I never really minded that you didn’t know, because I had Peter and Nightingale.
Do you even know me, anymore?
Lesley squeezes her mum’s hand and smiles so that the lines of worry around her eyes soften. “I’m fine, Mum.”
Behind the Sainsbury’s, there’s this small strip of sharp, filthy gravel between the back wall of the supermarket and a scrubby patch of wild ex-industrial land which backs, in turn, onto the far wall of the primary school. This strip is where all the pipes and vents and fuseboxes are hidden - those things that make the store function, but which are ugly and tucked away from the public. It’s gross and dirty and dark, the only light provided by the deliberately-friendly orange glow of the bright lettering on the wall above and what little sunlight can straggle down through the thick cloud overhead.
Lesley, tucked up against the back wall under a big square vent pipe in a space barely a metre square, mechanically removes a jam doughnut from the bag between her trainers and takes a bite. She does not look at it once; she does not taste the sugar; she does not feel the sharp shards of rock under her. Her eyes are fixed on the brick school wall opposite. She is trying very hard not to think.
She barely hears the steady crunch of feet on gravel, but when her view of the wall is disturbed by polished leather shoes and trousers pressed so sharply they could cut glass, she flinches back into herself and draws her legs even tighter into her chest. Is she trying to hide? No - he’s seen her, she knows that.
To back away from danger, then. All right.
The shoes pause for a moment, allowing her to settle. And then Nightingale folds carefully to the floor, not mindful in the least of his fine clothes on the filthy, dusty gravel, and sits cross-legged and easy beside her space. He chooses a space perpendicular to her; she can see him entirely, easily, but he must turn his head to look at her. What’s more, he’s left her exit route entirely open - it’d be an awkward shuffle to get out from under the vent pipe, but from there it would be nothing to get past him, across the grassy waste, over the wall and away. She could do it.
She doesn’t.
“May I have a doughnut?” Nightingale asks politely. She pushes the paper bag forward slightly with one finger. “Thank you.” He looks a little comical and childish, sitting in his expensive vintage suit with his legs folded and sugar on his fingers and chin, and Lesley can’t bear it.
“Is Peter alright?” she says, voice very level and steady.
Nightingale is good to her, and does not even think to hesitate. “Yes, perfectly. Sergeant Stephanopoulos is keeping an eye on him in the Folly, as, of course, is Molly. He was only a little bruised and shaken in the event, though I imagine Dr. Walid will want some more thorough checks made.”
Lesley winces very slightly in quiet solidarity - he’ll have to go in the MRI, probably, and they both hate that. It’s noisy and cramped and also just extremely boring; easily the worst bit of learning magic, barring the alternative of your brain melting into goo or whatever.
Or. That had been the worst bit. Who knows what the future may yet hold.
“He’d have you in as well, if he thought he could catch you,” Nightingale adds conversationally, polishing off the last of his doughnut and brushing sugar from his fingertips. He says it so easily, as if her running were only that of an errant child hiding from a doctor’s appointment, to be chided and won over with a sticker and a lollypop.
Lesley attempts to pull her legs in even tighter.
“Yeah, my brain’s probably fried,” she says, just as light and easy. Fuck it, what’s the point of everything going tits-up if you can’t be blasé and funny about it? “Loads of fun new scans - Walid’ll love it. Variation is the spice, and all.”
“Yes, well,” Nightingale says, frowning at his fingertips, “let’s aim to disappoint, shall we?” He’s gone all taut and disapproving and a little sad, as he often does when she and Peter display what he considers to be a little too much of that good old millennial morbid humour. They’d explained once that it was just a perfectly normal cultural response to current politics, capitalism, and climate change all culminating in what increasingly seems like the end of days. Nightingale had simply folded his newspaper and reminded them of the two world wars, the one cold war, and the many deaths of institutions, people, and magics that he held dear which he had lived through, and that he was, therefore, familiar with that comedic style; if they could oblige him in refraining from accepting death at the breakfast table simply because they’d spilled coffee on their toast, his stress levels would appreciate it.
“Gonna have to, aren’t I?” Lesley says, maintaining that morbid cheer. “Not like I can just wander into UCH any more.”
“You won’t be denied medical care, Lesley,” Nightingale says firmly, almost before his mind really catches up to what she’s saying - he can’t quite hide the slight, brief twist to the corner of his mouth like he is poorly concealing physical pain. Had she known it would hurt him? It’s hard to say, now, when there is so obviously no other outcome.
“I’ve fucked up, haven’t I,” she says calmly, watching his face shutter briefly with a mild, objective interest.
He closes his eyes and breathes deeply for just one moment, and then gathers all his loose edges in. It is always fascinating to see Nightingale, and the Nightingale-that-is-not-Nightingale: there is a Nightingale who cooks bacon sandwiches on Molly’s day off and inevitably burns them, and who talks back to the radio about the cricket while he fusses about under the bonnet of the Jag, and who has spent hours and hours with a scientific calculator and an education he’s had a good century to forget trying to help Peter and Lesley with their maths homework; and there is the Nightingale who is a serious and respected inspector and a terrifyingly powerful wizard. She forgets, sometimes. She thinks she might be about to speak to the latter Nightingale.
“Yes,” he says steadily, hands folded in his lap and gaze clear and calm on the horizon. “Lesley May, you have consorted with a known criminal and aided and abetted him in his actions, which have led to extensive property damage, minor injuries, and the aforesaid criminal’s acquisition of what we shall, for convenience, refer to as an extremely dangerous weapon.”
“I think it just is one,” she interrupts. “It’s a big sword, so. Magicness is a secondary factor.”
Nightingale tilts his head in elegant concession. “If you like.”
She doesn’t, especially.
“You will be arrested and tried, though I do not expect a very punitive sentence,” Nightingale continues in a voice dispassionate and legalistic and - not cold, exactly, but not warm. Disinterested, maybe: not influenced by personal factors, like any good police officer. She picks up a doughnut and takes a bite to keep from chewing her lip, or tearing at her fingernails, or putting her head into her knees and screaming. “Your youth will factor in your favour, even though you are now of an age to be tried as an adult. I imagine a jury would be sympathetic, with a good lawyer, and of course I will vouch for you if they allow it - I don’t know the conflict of interest rules anymore, I’m afraid, but-”
“You’ll - vouch for me?” Lesley blurts out, the remains of the doughnut abandoned to the gravel at her side.
“Mm,” Nightingale confirms rather absently. “Dr. Walid can take a look at you once you’re in custody, for safety’s sake, and I will speak to your parents. I will-” he pauses, and for a moment the version of himself wobbles; his knuckles go suddenly white and his gaze drops to the floor for a moment. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen him try this hard at being Inspector Nightingale. And then he recovers, gaze fine and clear like a cold February morning, and he presses on. “I will take responsibility.”
“What-” Lesley gestures vaguely, face scrunched in confusion. “Literally why would you do any of that? Speak for me and tell my parents and take the blame. Why the fuck would you do that after what I’ve done?”
Nightingale doesn’t look at her, just shrugs very slightly in that elegant, posh way of his that somehow doesn’t make him seem rude and uncaring, and that no-one else is able to pull off. “I have to.”
“You really don’t,” Lesley says, bewildered into fury. “You’re not responsible for my actions - I’m eighteen years old and legally an adult and everything that happened is my fault, so I don’t know where you get off telling me that’s not true. I’ve gone totally against, like, everything you told us not to do, and worked with your enemy and put people in danger and now you’re just sitting here like nothing’s happened and we’re all going hom- back to the Folly for tea and I don’t get it!”
“We cannot carry on as though nothing has happened-” Nightingale begins with deliberate calm.
Lesley throws her hands up. “I know that! That’s what I’m saying!”
“-but it does not follow that we cannot carry on at all,” he continues, one palm held up to ask for patience. “The world has not ended, Lesley.”
“It might do,” she retaliates mulishly, her arms folded over her chest. “Faceless has got Arthur’s actual sword, or whatever, so he can pretty much do whatever the fuck he wants.”
Nightingale tilts his head calmly, considering this. “Unless the rightful owner wakes up to retrieve it,” he says musingly.
Lesley raises an eyebrow. “You’re going to wake up King Arthur,” she says. “Dig him up from under his hill, nick him off the Welsh, point him at Faceless and shout fetch?”
“Well, historically,” Nightingale says, “a certain organisation feeling themselves heir to British magic and thus not only Newton but also Merlin and Arthur and so on have undertaken to act on his behalf in such matters, in the event that the king doesn’t wake up on his own.”
“So now you’re King Arthur,” Lesley says, resisting the urge to put her head in her hands. “The king asleep in the fucking mountain, born ages ago and now back to save us all in our time of greatest need. What if you just can’t?”
And for the first time, Nightingale turns and looks at her fully, holding her gaze gently but without mercy. She notices only then that his hair is ruffled out of its usual pin-neatness, his tie askew and loosened, the lines around his eyes heavy like they’ve been chiselled into his face. Nightingale looks tired and sad and worried, and Lesley wishes he would give her the chance to turn tail and duck away from his old, old eyes. “You are not past saving, Lesley,” he says, and he might have stabbed her. “Of course I will speak for you, and hold myself accountable for whatever I did or did not do to help you, and - and forgive you. I am afraid that there will be punishment, of course,” he says, gaze dropping away under the weight of expressing that emotion, and Lesley can feel prickling behind her eyes. “But, afterwards. There will be something afterwards. I do not have to be a part of it, but I will be if you would like.”
And - Lesley can see it. Only a bit. But for the first time since everything had gone so horribly, terribly wrong all at once, she can see a little bit beyond it. Maybe, in that nebulous afterwards, Peter will be serving with Nightingale, and they can all have dinner together and tell her about it.
“No Hendon,” she points out softly. She can’t quite see past that one.
“No,” Nightingale allows. “No Hendon. But I’m sure something else will take its place.”
“Like architecture,” she says, the joke coming to her almost automatically; but she barely has time to regret the attempt before Nightingale huffs a surprised laugh at his hands.
“For the sake of my sanity, please do not,” he says, his voice warm with amusement.
“Would Peter not approve?” she inquires sweetly. Peter has only recently adjusted to the idea that Hendon and the Folly squad might not be such a terrible idea after all, what with the magic and the access to the Rivers, even if it does come with a lot more guardian supervision. Architecture remains a rather touchy subject.
Nightingale huffs again and tilts his head right back to gaze up at the clouds. “Oh, Lesley,” he says, fond and tragic, “what did I do wrong by you?”
Lesley shuts her eyes and bites her lip, breathing through the rush of tears. “Nothing,” she says quickly, but her voice wobbles traitorously. “You did nothing wrong.”
Nightingale holds up a hand, fingers trailing against the air in the shapes of a dejected saint, a despairing martyr. “There is no need to defend me to myself, Lesley,” he says. “I am - I am fulfilling a great many roles, of which I am fit for none. The Folly was never intended to be so reduced, and never only to me. I have been trained only to be an officer and an inspector and now I am the Folly’s sole keeper, a mentor, and a guardian - for all of which I was and remain woefully unprepared. I do not doubt that I have erred, and likely will again; I should only like to know in what way I have failed you.”
Lesley swallows hard around the ball of guilt sitting heavy and swollen in her throat. This is not Nightingale the Inspector, nor Nightingale Peter’s dad - this is someone uncomfortably close to Thomas Nightingale himself, no more and no less, surrounded by all the attendant hopes and fears and worries due to any person.
“You did nothing wrong,” she repeats. “You’ve been a good teacher and you’ve been great to Peter. He adores you.” Nightingale tilts his head slightly in a little internal negation and she frowns. “I mean it, he loves you. You’re a good - a good dad. And a good teacher. And you’ve always been - kind to me. You didn’t do anything.”
“Then-” Nightingale says, making half a sharp gesture with his hand and then deliberately folding them back into his lap. He starts again, calmer. “Then why are we here, Lesley?”
Lesley examines her fingernails, hands tucked up between her chest and her knees. She feels like she might be sick if she says anything, but.
Nightingale deserves to know.
“I - it’s difficult,” she says, “to be the sixth of six girls. My parents are busy all the time, and anything I do-” she shrugs. “My sisters will have done it first. I can’t be their first priority all the time. That’s not their fault. But.” She sniffs, thumbing at her nose. It isn’t her parents’ fault that she can’t have their attention whenever she needs it; she can’t blame them for that. It’s just miserable to lie in bed, in the smallest room in the house, and wonder if they’d even notice if she just picked up all her clothes and moved into a spare room in the Folly, if Nightingale didn’t call them about it first.
“I was one of seven,” Nightingale offers. “The youngest boy. It felt a little as though I had been deemed - disposable, when I was sent to Casterbrook.”
“When you were sent to a special elite school and given magical powers?” Lesley spits, abruptly nasty and vicious. What the fuck does Nightingale know, anyway?
Nightingale flinches slightly, eyes briefly closing and face going taut in pain. “Yes,” he says quietly. “My apologies.”
But Lesley continues as if he hadn’t spoken. “Whisked away to live somewhere grand and exciting and different, with magic and games and shit? When you were a kid, when you’re really into stories all about that exact fucking thing, you got to live that dream? I’ll tell you what really sucks - watching that happen to your best friend when you’re still sixth and fucking disposable.”
Nightingale’s face hardens slightly, as she had known it would. “That was hardly a dream for Peter,” he says sharply.
Lesley spreads her hands in broad fury. “I know! So I can’t even complain about it and whenever I try to talk to anyone about it I’m a horrible, ungrateful little girl. And I just wanted Peter to be happy - and then when he was, I wanted what he had so badly. And you were nice to me. You let me come over whenever, eat your food, go on day-trips with you both like we were all a little family and you were so - indulgent, like my parents never have time to be. Do you - do you remember once, when we were kids, Seawoll had to come over for some reason and we’d absolutely filled the atrium with Lego - and you just told him to step carefully around it, because you didn’t want to make us move it and spoil the game?”
Nightingale is looking at her with terrible, bewildered sorrow. “I confess,” he says quietly, “I do not.”
“That’s - sort of my point,” Lesley says, deflating slightly into quiet, resigned calm. “It was nothing to you, to make Seawoll walk around - to give us space, as if our Lego was exactly as important as your murder investigation. As if we were as important as your job.”
“You are,” Nightingale says helplessly with a tiny, easy shrug. “Of course you are - you are both more important than any job.”
“Nightingale, my mum made us put all our toys away if she just wanted to hoover,” Lesley says. “If Dad’s job was on the line, we would have had to give up everything. My parents can’t afford to prioritise me like you can afford to put Peter first. So I hung on your coattails for years, trying to get some of that for me, and I got to be your apprentice and learn magic and it was great because now I wasn’t sixth all the time, I was second. Constantly. I was only there because Peter liked me; you had to look after me because it made Peter happier. And-” she tilts her head back, blinking hard against the sky. She is not going to cry. “I got so tired of it. Being second-best. Heading for Hendon, Peter’s second-best. Being your second apprentice, when all the Rivers and everyone else only want to know about Peter. I hated it, but being second was better than sixth, and I - I liked pretending that I was part of the Folly, just like Peter.”
Nightingale breathes in sharply. She presses on.
“And then he turned up - and he said I just had to help him get the sword, and he would make me his apprentice. Just me, his first choice, one and only. I didn’t think it could be so bad - maybe both Peter and me would be better off with one mentor each. And then-” her voice hitches on a sob, but it is impossible to stop now. “Then he got it and he said he only wanted the real inheritance of Arthur, he wanted everything due to the king asleep in the mountain, and he didn’t want me at all - he only wanted Peter.”
The tears are streaking down her cheeks now, fast and fast and hot and bitter. That little betrayal within a betrayal, that trip she should have seen coming - it had been a bolt from the blue, punching all the air out of her. Lesley had been nothing to him, really. A means to an end; an acceptable second-choice apprentice, if the best could not be had. She had stood in the rubble, unable to breathe as Faceless went on monologuing - and then she had waited for Nightingale to start distracting him by hurling benches and the like at Faceless’ shield, she had lobbed a brick at the back of Faceless’ head, and she had taken off running over the wall, across the field, and into Sainsbury’s. They’d never done it as kids, in the end. No time like the present.
“Oh, Lesley,” Nightingale says very softly. “I am so sorry.”
“You didn’t do anything,” she repeats around her tears, stubborn and mulish.
“And I should have,” he says. “I am guilty of assuming - for I assumed that you knew, as I did, that you have always been a part of the Folly, just as much as Peter. I have not done enough for you. I leaned upon you too heavily when you were still just a child, hoping that you would help Peter to grieve and heal, and when you did so I assumed that you knew you were indispensable, and that I - that I feel you to be my charge as much as Peter is. I laid too much upon you and gave you no reward. I am so very, deeply sorry.”
Lesley scrubs her eyes to clear them and hiccups around a sob as she looks at him. Nightingale’s eyes are too bright, as though they are perhaps rather wet too - and he looks as deeply, genuinely sorry as he says he is. She doesn’t think Nightingale has ever lied to her; it is very easy to trust that he does not mean to start doing so now.
“I’m sorry,” she says. She’s sorry for a lot of things. Apologising is not going to be enough for almost all of it.
But Nightingale smiles at her, wide and hopeful and pleased like it’s a very good start, and holds his hand out, palm up, into her little hiding place in amongst the ugly, dirty, hidden things. Lesley places her hand into his; it looks very small and childlike as his fingers close around hers and shield them entirely, giving them a little squeeze. “I know.”
When Lesley is twenty, about two years after it happened, she walks out of a door holding a backpack and a coat and enough money for a taxi, though without a destination in mind. She hasn’t asked anyone to pick her up. She doesn’t need to worry that they wouldn’t want to.
There is a bright orange Ford parked on the curb in the pick-up zone; she only notices it because of its incredible colour. But on closer inspection, there is a tall gentleman in a very fine suit leaned up against it doing the crossword in a folded-up newspaper, cane tucked under one arm like the lead of a black-and-white film. A man out of time, a hero of old merely waiting for his time to rise again.
She debates making a break for it, but with his usual preternatural sense of timing (she and Peter had long ago agreed that he gets it from Molly) he glances up and spots her dawdling on the threshold. He smiles and puts his crossword away; she walks over, unable to do anything else.
“Hello Lesley,” Nightingale says.
“Nightingale.” She shifts her bag between her hands, and then nods at the orange Ford. “See you’ve sold the Jag while I was inside.”
Nightingale’s expression immediately shifts to one of distaste and he straightens from his lean as though the car might give off some kind of embarrassing infectious disease. “It’s Peter’s,” he says, glaring down at it. “He insisted that it not be white. He wanted to drive us today to collect you, but unfortunately he’s been caught up in something at work - I pulled rank on Seawoll to get out of it, of which I am sure I will never hear the end - and so I am to present Peter’s apologies, and to inform you he would love to see you as soon as you’re available, if you would like.”
Lesley’s legs stutter forwards and Nightingale winds up hugging her back as much to keep her from falling over as anything. “Oh - oh,” he says, startled - but then something in him seems to click and Lesley finds herself wrapped up tightly, the crown of her head tucked protectively under his chin. “There, now. It’s all right.”
Lesley presses her face into his shoulder and breathes in the familiar smell of the soap Molly uses on any clothes left unwashed in the Folly for more than half an hour. It smells like Peter’s hoodie at her side, like Nightingale’s scarf when he decides she’s not dressed for the weather, like bedsheets at a sleepover and that particular sleepy security of home where there’s someone, always, to look out for you.
“Thank you for coming to get me,” she says, voice muffled.
Nightingale’s arms tighten for a moment. “Of course,” he says, voice rumbling through his chest against her ear. “Of course, Lesley. It is my pleasure.”