To Live and To Breathe (Could Be #2)

Chapter 11

Sam stopped outside the street door, waiting until Timothy caught up, and then nodded conspiratorially as they set off down the street. "You are acquainted with the fact that Mr. Graham's miraculous questionary powers extend primarily to young ladies?" he asked, and Timothy squinted at him. He stood fully a head taller than the square-built, strange little person walking half a pace in the lead.

"Perfectly," he said. He wasn't sure that they even had that advantage between them. Perhaps it was just as well—he didn't approve of Mr. Graham's methods. It would take a miracle to get them an interview.

"Well, the man murdered at Chillingham Place had no one employed for him but a middle-aged butler and a sour old crone that kept house, and both were absolutely proof to his powers," Sam went on, and Timothy's mind strayed to the fact that the sunlight highlighted the threadbare fibers of Sam's brown coat and strangely squashed, shapeless, threadbare brown hat. Poor, but not destitute. He reminded Timothy of the spindly, wild-headed weeds that always seemed to spring up on the edge of a country lane.

"So," Sam wound up simply, "We've got our work cut out for us."

Timothy merely snorted in assent. It was like he'd thought: they hadn't a chance. "Where is Chillingham Place located?" he asked instead. Sam had a curious, rolling gait that didn't seem to be slowed a bit, even though Timothy could keep pace. It was so unlike the brisk shuffle performed by the passersby joining them on the street that it gave rise to the nagging suspicion that Sam had not been bred in the smoggy, choked city surrounding them. His was the walk of someone used to space. Timothy envied him this.

"It's on the west edge of Thameton—" Sam began, and Timothy stopped.

"Have you got cab money?" he asked, fixing his gaze determinedly on the "to let" sign in the shop window behind Sam in an effort to hide his shame. "Because I haven't any." He couldn't walk that far, and the memory of what had happened the last time he'd tried was still too fresh to allow him to convince himself otherwise.

Sam was silent for a long moment. "As a matter of fact, I do," he said, and Timothy looked back at him to find that the aspiring doctor had just lifted his eyes from his foot. A prickle of indignation ran up Timothy's spine, but he shoved it back down and followed as Sam hailed a cab. The shame of needing a cab at all was only surmounted by the shame of finding himself indebted to another's pocket. He wondered if it would really be too much for God to bestow a few extra thalers on the Wrights. What was wrong with being comfortably poor?

When they were seated in a cab and gagging on the musty scent of old leather, Sam asked the question Timothy had been dreading ever since he met him: "What happened to you?"

Of course he'd wait until Timothy was a captive audience to ask it. "I spend too much time with a parrot," he said, bracing himself in the corner as the cab lurched over a bump. The window, unfortunately, was too dirty to make looking out of it a convincing distraction.

Sam studied Timothy as if trying to make sense of him. Timothy wished him well in the endeavor. He'd been at it for nineteen years. "That isn't what I was asking," Sam said.

Timothy met his gaze. "But it's what I'm answering."

The cab rattled over another bump, and Timothy's right foot skittered loose from the floor. He replaced it quickly, but not before Sam saw, and Timothy cursed his luck.

"Your ankle is stiff," Sam said slowly, and squinted at Timothy like someone who was putting two and two together.

"His name's St. Vincent," Timothy said instead, looking at the dirt on the window. His only hope lay in distracting Sam with another startling fact. "The parrot, that is—he used to swear in dog lingua, but that scandalized a friend of mine and so now he says 'hallelujah' instead." Most of the time.

To Timothy's relief, Sam seemed to deem it best not to press the issue any further. Whether he was silent because he sensed unwillingness, or silent because he didn't know what to make of the oddity sitting across from him Timothy didn't know, and didn't much care. He didn't want anyone at The Thameton Pry to know that he'd never finished school—it wasn't proper on the surface, and looked worse in the details. No one wanted to hire a coward that had wasted a good four years' worth of education simply because he couldn't face his schoolmates' slow abandonment. What might he do when things grew difficult in the workplace? It didn't bear thinking of.

He'd told himself that these were his reasons for keeping secret so many times he was starting to believe them, but perhaps, deep down, he was more frightened that the same rejection that had darkened his school days had followed him into adulthood. What was there to reject if they didn't know about it? At the moment he was simply an odd bird that kept to himself, and limped from a vague childhood accident. It was true enough. He wasn't treated as an equal, but he had managed to earn a small measure of respect. Sam's stubborn insistence that he help him had proven that.

Something foreign and very much like warmth began to thaw inside Timothy. It was nice to be wanted, if only for his work.

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There are a lot of characters I like named Sam, but the most influential in Sam's naming was Samwise Gamgee. Sam's last name was inspired by Thomas Paine, who was figuring prominently in the American Revolutionary module of history I was studying at the time of his naming. Paine for a wannabe doctor seemed laced with irony, so it stuck.

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