CHAPTER TWO.
THE ONE THING THAT Felicity Woods despised the most about herself was her naivety. She may have well of been nineteen years old again, when she had plaintively believed along with everyone else that the Great War would be over in a matter of months. . . or at the very most, a year. She hadn't ever expected that it would last any longer than that. Felicity Woods was clueless: that was the most simple way to put it.
As she walked home one evening with the sinking sun throwing vermillion light on the back of her figure, there wasn't a single thought that occupied her blonde head. Felicity could hardly call herself tired from work - serving drinks at the Black Swan wasn't the most exhausting of occupations - so a vibrancy filled her person that surprised her, but didn't alarm her.
What did alarm her, however, was the chaos that had suddenly descended on Small Heath that day, when the coppers came in search of the communists. Felicity didn't understand how such a thing had happened and why it had happened when anything of the sorts had never happened in the past.
So as Felicity Woods made her way down the street, she wasn't aware of the man on the opposite side. Rather, she was only aware of the distinct lack of thoughts in her head. . . especially because she knew that she would and should have thoughts on the entire situation.
"Evening." Tommy nodded at her from where he too was making his way down the road with his hands swinging by his side.
Felicity took a deep breath and crossed the road to him so that she fell into step beside the man. "What's going on?" She demanded, nodding first to the amber glow that was in front of them, at the end of the street and then to the houses, as a reference that had been caused earlier that day by the police officers.
A sharp exhale of air escaped the man before he answered. "We're lighting fires," he told her, "to raise the alarm."
It took everything in the girl to stop the sound of indignance and disbelief from leaving her lips. "Alarm for what?" She asked instead.
"The new coppers from Belfast," Tommy said simply, without any further explanation, as though Felicity should know what he meant by that.
"What about them?"
When she glanced across to him, a ghost of a smile was glimmering on his lips, as though he found something amusing that the girl had no such knowledge of. "They're breaking into our homes, interfering with things that have no need for their interference," he replied, "and we don't want that happening, so we're raising the alarm."
Felicity made a quiet noise of understanding - when really, she didn't understand much more than she had five minutes ago. "All right," she hummed.
The man nodded and with that, the pair continued to walk in silence, nearing the amber glow with every step that they took. It didn't take them long for them to reach it and soon Felicity was surrounded with the growing murmur of voices as men and women alike crowded together to watch the vermillion flames rising up into the sky, licking up the broken glass panes of numerous portraits of what appeared to be. . . the King?
"Is that. . .?" Felicity whispered hoarsely to Thomas, leaning across so that he could hear her among the crowd's volume.
"The King?"
Felicity nodded. "Why are they burning his pictures?"
"We're raising the alarm," he repeated, and it was then that a man came up behind the two, "we fought for four years from him and we don't want him to see what these coppers are doing."
"Tommy," he greeted him, nodding to someone behind him that Felicity couldn't make out. . . partly due to him being blocked by the other, and partly due to the darkness that surrounded them.
Felicity sensed that she should go and so that was what she did, escaping into the crowd and leaving the gangster to converse with the man.
⎯
"What the hell happened here?" Felicity exclaimed as she pushed open the door to the Black Swan with her boot, her eyes widening as she caught sight of the soot that filled the room and covered the remaining, charred furniture.
Sam, the barman, glanced up at her from where he was standing in the midst of the mess, the fear that was clouding his eyes only just ebbing away when he saw it was Felicity that had entered rather than another one of those Peaky Blinder devils. He wasn't even sure what had happened, nevertheless why it had happened. . . with his only recollection of the past two hours being of when two men walked through the door as though they owned the place, despite having never set foot in the pub before that night.
"They came in with matches. Left straight afterwards," he told her monotonously, not bothering to go into any other detail unless she asked for it.
Felicity nudged a glass bottle with her foot before answering. "Who did?"
He raised an eyebrow at her. "Who'd you think?" Sam blurted, "The Peaky fucking Blinders, maybe? It's all they do, shit like this for no apparent reason."
"They wouldn't. . . they're not. . ."
Sam stared at her expectantly. "They're not what?"
"Didn't you see the fire?" Felicity asked, "They're nowhere near here, Sam, they couldn't have done it."
"Well, they bloody well did," he countered, "you think I'd mix them up with anyone else? Now, I don't know why they'd do such a thing, but that's not the fucking point."
Felicity only nodded absentmindedly as she took slow steps in a circle around the main room, her eyes taking in the sight of shattered glass and overall chaos of the burned pub. As to why Tommy - because no doubt he was the orchestrator of both the burning of the King's photographs and of the Black Swan - had decided to do such a thing, Felicity had no idea on, but she now was finding it harder and harder to believe that he wouldn't do it. She didn't know the man. She had spoken to him twice, had she not? Felicity's only knowledge of Thomas Shelby was that he wasn't afraid. . . not of the police bastard from Belfast, nor of any of life's other trials.
"I'll be back," she told Sam after another five minutes of silence.
Felicity turned on her heel and made her way out of the pub - if it could hardly be called such a thing anymore. It would have no use until someone decided that its charred insides had better been made clear for a new establishment. . . meaning Felicity Woods would have no work until such a thing happened, and she knew that even the realisation and idea of clearing it would not occur for many weeks, or even months. She was jobless. With the winter months only a mere three weeks away, Felicity knew it was better to have a steady job in the months of December and January rather than have to rely on those more unpleasant, forced occupations.
She didn't run through the streets as she wanted to - mainly because it was cold, but also because she knew of the crowd that was there and that Thomas Shelby would no doubt be surrounded by. As she neared the amber lit scene, with the glowing bonfire in the midst of the assembly, her eyes strained to make out the figure of the gangster. He wasn't too hard to spot, for not only was there a small circle where no one dared to stand, but there was also a man walking quickly away. . . a man who clearly didn't belong among the others, both with his round glasses and the hostile expressions being thrown to him from either side as he escaped the scene.
"Tommy Shelby?" Felicity called, nearing him.
He turned his head to glance at her for a moment or two before focusing back on the scene in front of them. "I suppose you saw the pub," he acknowledged.
"You suppose?" The girl retorted, folding her arms both with indignance and to prevent the cold from creeping across her person.
Thomas merely shrugged. "I need you, Felicity Woods," he said simply.
"So you've said."
AUTHOR'S NOTE
look ! I'm being productive and actually
writing. well done me. anyway it's less
than a week until christmas and i kinda
don't want it to come bc it always goes
so fast and cjjsjcjsjcjjs. hope u enjoyed
this chapter , feel free to leave votes n
comments bc yk you're nice like that.
i love you !