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Two years on, and Denny thinks he’s finally turning a corner.
The plant nursery - one of the only employers in Reddington that isn’t beholden to either the royal house or fucking Synka - doesn’t care about his disgraces, only that he doesn’t repeat them, and he didn’t get around to looking for work until he was enough out of his own head that the ‘not watering the plants’ thing won’t be a concern. (He wonders if anyone ever noticed that he cut the water supply to the greenhouse. Or if they remembered it’s supposed to have a second door.) His coworkers leave him alone. He knows how to not attract the Red Guard’s attention. He’s getting by, and if all else fails, he did pick up half-decent distillery skills before it all fell apart.
So of course, the past just has to come back to haunt him.
“Denny?” Alicia calls, sticking her head into the nursery’s back room without actually stepping out of the front area. “There’s somebody here looking for you.”
“Did… they say what it’s about?”
“No, just that he wants to talk to you.” Alicia hesitates. “Well. I think ‘want’ might be a strong word. No armbands, though.”
Denny sighs, as much relief as trepidation. No armbands is a promising sign - the Red Guard tend to like being blatantly obvious about their presence - but he has no idea who else would come looking for him. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
When he makes it out front, he stops short so quickly that he almost trips over his own feet. “Christoph?”
Alicia was right; ‘want’ is absolutely a strong word. Most of Christoph’s face is perfectly neutral, the reason he got away with making so many deliveries. Denny probably only catches the lingering resentment in his eyes because he’s looking for it. “The baron wishes to speak with you.”
“I don’t know what the old man could poss--” Denny stops short. No, Baron Sinclair’s been dead for months now. There was a thing in the paper about his nephew being named Mount Holly’s ‘provisional’ heir, and he’d bet quite a bit on knowing exactly what that provision was. “Right. Okay. I’m done in half an hour.”
Christoph only looks at Denny before turning on his heel and leaving the nursery.
“What was that about?” Alicia asks, and Denny sighs.
“I really, really don’t want to talk about it.”
He’s experienced longer half-hours in his life, but not by much. What could the kid possibly want from him? Mount Holly almost certainly passed out of Sinclair’s hands littered with the wreckage of Bad Idea Theatre, starring Denny Revane; the Angels only know what kind of impression that left behind.
Christoph isn’t interested in giving him any answers. Denny’s fairly certain the only reason Christoph bothers getting out of the car is so Denny can fold the front seat down and squeeze into the back, rather than share the front seat. Not that it would have improved the icy silence, if he were sitting up front. If anything, it would probably be worse.
“I owe you an apology,” he finally says, just to hear something other than the car’s motor. “I was - not at my best, and you ended up taking the brunt of it.”
“I appreciate you acknowledging that, Dennis,” Christoph says, after letting Denny sweat through a couple of traffic lights.
“Don’t call me that.”
Christoph huffs out a sigh. “Of the two of us, I’m the one who nearly drove directly into a sting operation that would have ruined so much more than your reputation, had I not recognised the signs before I made the stop. An apology is the least of what you owe me. As I know better than to expect any further financial compensation, and would really rather not talk to you again, we’ll both have to settle for what we can get.”
“…Fair enough, I guess.” Denny gives up on conversation as a bad job, and settles for staring out the window until the scenery becomes too familiar to tolerate.
***
He can say this much: Mount Holly is a fucking gorgeous place, especially in the hands of someone who’s not too depressed and bitter to give a shit about proper maintenance of the grounds. When Denny was a kid, he used to dream about working at a place like this.
It’s not his eight-year-old self’s fault the dream turned out to be such a nightmare.
Christoph stops the car in front of the manor, and barely waits for Denny to disentangle himself from the back seat before he gets back in and pulls around to the garage. So much for asking where he’s supposed to go next, then. He’s absolutely not going to brave the house. He might know how this place works better than anyone on the staff save possibly Mrs. Babbage, but he also knows himself; if he starts down that rabbit hole again, regardless of how much has already been drafted for the day, he might never escape.
“Denny!”
He barely has time to turn toward that shriek from the entrance hall before he suddenly has an armful of the sort of busty blonde that most men would drool over. (It’s never been like that between him and Bridgette, though; well before the moonshining project, they bonded over how annoying it is to constantly have to tell your parents you don’t want children, thanks, now please stop asking when that’s going to change, because it isn’t. Politics aside, Mount Holly does have a tendency to attract society’s misfit toys, and he misses that more than anything else about it.) Denny stumbles as he catches her, but he’s laughing.
All right. Whatever else comes of today, this was worth it.
“By Mila I’ve missed you it’s absolutely dire around here now no one knows how to have a decent conversation are you back to stay?” she says, without drawing breath. By the end, her eyes are full of such bright hope that Denny hates to have to crush it.
“That’ll be up to your new boss, I think, but… I kind of doubt it. I’m not sure it’d be good for me anyway.” Not unless the kid’s bringing some major changes to the table - which he’ll grant isn’t impossible, but Denny’s optimism died years ago. He doesn’t find it at all likely.
Bridgette sighs. “Well, you can’t blame a girl for asking. You are giving me your phone number before you leave, though, and no, you don’t get a choice in the matter.”
“Are you really that desperate for conversation?”
“Did you just skip over the part where I miss you? The new valet’s all right so far - the old man pretty much commanded Hartley to retire - but yes. Yes, I am. They went and fired my only friend on the staff, you know.”
“I got myself fired, Bridgette. You have to know that by now.” It would have happened sooner or later anyway, for his blatant dereliction of duty if not the moonshining operation. Denny just decided to flame out in spectacular fashion, and drag half the staff down with him.
“Still. I’ll go get Simon - and something for your phone number, don’t think you’re getting out of that. Don’t go anywhere!”
She disappears inside before Denny can say that he has no plans to. He’s a guest, after all, so technically he doesn’t have the same privileges to move around the manor as he used to, even if he wanted to. For all he knows, the padlock code to the orchard’s been changed since he got fired, and that’s a bit far to wander off at the moment anyway. (He wonders, for a moment, if they took his bedroom out of the outer room’s draft pool, or if it’s just one more reminder of the chaos he left behind.)
Bridgette returns a short eternity later, in the company of a gangly kid with white-blond hair and an expression that says he’s still working through a growth spurt that wasn’t only physical. She all but shoves a notebook into Denny’s hands, looking at him expectantly until he gives up and writes down his phone number - if she wants to stay in touch that badly, he’s hardly going to tell her no, for all he’s not convinced he deserves it. When he hands the notebook back, she beams at him, stuffs it into a pocket, and heads back inside.
“You must be Denny.” The kid holds out a hand. “Simon Jones, still getting used to the whole ‘baron’ thing. I’ve wanted to talk to you for a while now, actually.”
“You have?” Denny can’t help asking, even as he returns the handshake.
“Sure. I only know of two living people who’ve actually made it to the tenth rank, after all. Come with me.”
Simon turns not toward the house, but back down the driveway - baffling for a moment, until he draws up short at the entrance to the Blackbridge server grotto. It’s a weird place to have this kind of one-on-one conversation, weirder still when Denny sees a door at the back of the room is open, leading down a tunnel and to a wrecked, precarious staircase carved directly into the rock that Simon picks his way up with the precision of a kid who spent several years in scouting. (It’s not exactly uncommon, especially since it gives the royal house another opening to sink its propaganda hooks into kids’ minds; Denny only lasted a year and a half before he realised there wasn’t much gardening happening.)
The view at the top of the stairs is as breathtaking as it is alarming. “Is - is this part of fucking Castle Orindia?” Denny blurts out, before he can think better of swearing in front of a teenager who outranks him by a good bit.
“I think it must be.” Simon grins. “This is my favorite spot on the grounds, but I’m guessing you’d never seen it before.”
“Not so much, no.” It explains a lot about the estate’s hiring practices, though. If there’s one piece of the castle’s ruins on the grounds, there must be others. The Fenn Aries royal house has been trying to get to the ruins and destroy them for good, like they did with the long-gone railroad tracks, but even they haven’t been able to strongarm their way into every nook and cranny on the mountain. Their best crack at the manor would’ve been around the time Mary disappeared, and he knows from having been here at the time that nothing came of that.
“Are you sure you should’ve brought me out here? Seems like a big risk, all things considered.”
“Maybe. Or maybe not, given the underlying cause to which the letters pertain.” Simon raises an eyebrow. “You’ll probably be glad to know I found that in a safe.”
Denny wonders if it’s possible to melt into the floor under his feet. Of course the kid did it thoroughly. Anyone with the right kind of mind to get to that stupid fucking extra room is going to leave as few stones unturned as they can manage to. “Well, at least the old man learned something from the experience.” He sighs. “All right. What’s this about?”
“A few things. Not really the letters, though, other than what you went through to get your hands on them. I meant it when I said I wanted to know more about the only other living person who pulled that off. I did only find seven total, though.”
“I sent back everything I took.” Technically, they never left the estate at all; Denny just dropped the red envelopes in the office or the mail room, whichever he could get to first, as his demands were met. “Anything that’s still gone isn’t my fault. Did you not find enough evidence of my sorry exploits around here to satisfy you?”
“Not really, no.” Simon smiles, but it fades quickly as he bites his lip. “All things considered… I need to know what the other people around me know. And you pressed harder for the estate’s secrets than anyone else, so…”
Well. Denny can’t really argue that point.
“Getting to the tenth rank - kind of ate me alive. I was here when the Red Guard investigated your mother’s disappearance, but all I knew until I read those letters was that they found nothing. There was probably something going on with all those giant chess pieces, but I never actually saw a queen in a room, so I couldn’t very well test it.” Denny can only guess at one room that might have a queen in it, and with the moratorium on drafting in the west wing never formally lifted, for all people started doing it again anyway, he never had the chance to test that theory. “The only thing I fucked around with downstairs was getting to the north lever.”
Simon nods. “Nothing else weird jumped out at you?”
Denny almost says no, but then he thinks better of it. “There was water in the still when I first found it,” he admits. “Enough to fill the watering can, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with it other than water more plants. Mrs. Babbage was probably happy I actually did my job for once.”
“Probably.” Simon’s shoulders visibly relax, which only leaves Denny dead certain he missed something very important - but he forces himself not to ask. Whatever it is, he’s better off not knowing. “In that case, I guess there’s just one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I talked to Randolph. About the situation with your flowers.”
Denny scowls, because it’s that or actually snarling, and Simon doesn’t deserve that. He wasn’t here. He was still in grade school. As annoying as the reminder is, it’s not Simon’s fault. “And I imagine that got nowhere useful.”
“It wasn’t - okay, it wasn’t not about having more gems on site, but he said that’s not the main reason they told you not to go public. He said the main reason is politics. If the Fenn Aries royal house knew about those, no one would ever see them again, and you wouldn’t get any kind of credit for your work.”
It’s a fair point, as much as Denny doesn’t want to admit it, and one he was in no state of mind to acknowledge at the time. He just wanted - still wants - recognition for his achievement. He wants people to be able to benefit from it, not just a select few. Being told he couldn’t even have that stung, and that sting kicked off the whole sorry mess he got himself into.
Simon reaches into a pocket, pulling out one of the estate’s allowance envelopes; when he presses it into Denny’s hands, it’s very heavy, enough to startle him out of his thoughts.
“Five gold for every flower I know I’ve used since I found your log book,” Simon says, by way of explanation. “Maybe the politics will change eventually, or maybe they won’t; it’ll probably take years if they do, anyway. But in the meantime? Uncle Herbert should have at least paid you for your work, and I intend to start. You should make sure I have your address before you go, so I can send the next payment along.”
For one of a handful of times in his life, Denny’s not sure what to say. Even if some of the money in this envelope is five-pieces, there’s obviously a lot of it - and Simon’s planning to keep paying him? It doesn’t seem like he thinks he needs to keep buying Denny’s silence, either; if anything, he seems genuinely upset by the injustice the old man did.
Like he thinks paying Denny for his work is the right thing to do.
“You might actually be good for this place, kid.” Even as he says it, Denny’s not sure if he means Mount Holly, Fenn Aries, Orinda Aries, or something else entirely.
“I sure hope so.” Simon sags in place, for a moment less a kid and more a young man with an impossible weight on his shoulders, before he perks up again. “Oh, one more thing I was wondering. How did you manage to draft the root cellar and the trading post at the same time to get the vegetables to the still?”
Denny blinks, then laughs as he sees where Simon got turned around. “I didn’t. What, did someone turn off the manor’s night settings while you were working on that ‘provision’?”
Simon stares at him for a few moments, before burying his face in his hands. “They did, yes. Now I just feel silly. You had a bedroom out there, of course it falls under the night settings.”
“Exactly. Pulled stuff out of the root cellar and stashed it around the back, kept it in my room overnight, drafted the trading post the next day before anyone else had a chance to get out there. It’s all about knowing how to game the system.”
“Yeah, I guess it is.” Simon’s face settles into a more serious expression, if not quite as solemn than when he asked how many of the manor’s secrets Denny had unearthed. “There might be other things I’ll want to pick your brain about, in the future, but I don’t know what they are, and I don’t think I will until I find them. I’d greatly appreciate it if you could make time for me, on those occasions. The good news is that I’ll probably have a driver’s license before anything else comes up, or I could probably arrange things so Bridgette can do it.”
Denny nods. “That’d be better for everyone than making poor Christoph shuttle me all over creation. I’m not going to drop everything for the sake of this house again, but… if you’re willing to make the arrangements ahead of time, I’ll consider it.”
“That’s fair. Thank you for coming on such short notice today, seriously.”
Not even having to deal with Christoph’s icy silence on the drive back is enough to really put a damper on Denny’s mood. He’s still not inclined to optimism, but for the first time since he found the still in the back of the trading post, he feels like maybe things will be more okay than not, for a while.