Chapter Text
It was his nurse who had found him, half-smothered and writhing along with the vipers that had invaded his crib. She had screamed, and that had alerted the maids, they had called for Morgan and Custis' tutor, Miss Smedley, and she had fetched the butler, who grumbles and leans heavily on his stick and wheezes as he climbs the stairs and takes one look at the bawling child covered in bite-marks, bundled in the arms of a cooing maid and says
'And has anyone informed Lady Pendleton?!'
'We're sorry, Master Higgins! Maria found him, and she was so very worried and...'
'By the Void! Wallace! Someone tell Wallace to get Lady Pendleton -' The maids flounder uncertainly '- IMMEDIATELY!'
'Yes, sir,' whispers one maid, meekly, and she disappears as Higgins all but collapses onto the chaise lounge, mopping his brow with a handkerchief.
'What's happened to him?'
'There were vipers, sir, and he was tied to the crib, and covered with a blanket, and we think that maybe the twins -'
'- Well of course it was the twins, Miss Peters. You know very well that the twins are wicked children. We are almost lucky in the fact that when a crime is perpetrated in this house, we have but two possible culprits, and they never work alone. Will he live? It would kill her Ladyship to have to bury him, you know.'
The girl falters, and Treavor's breathing seems ever so quiet. 'I don't know, sir. He seems awful sick.'
Higgins heaves a sigh, 'Where is Maria? Isn't it her job to look after him?'
'... They took her downstairs, sir. She fainted.'
Higgins is about to launch into a speech about why the woman should be fired, and the other cock-ups she's made, and how if this gets out it will make him look bad, and it will make the Pendletons look bad, and that, for Higgins, is a fate worse than death – when his son appears, Lady Pendleton in tow.
'Oh, Treavor!' she half-sobs, and Wallace is fast enough to grab her as she sways on her feet. Lady Pendleton had always wanted a large family, Wallace's father had once told him, but she never had much luck with children. The midwife had told her not to name the stillborn babies, that they had never crossed the Strictures and would pass on into the stars. The midwife said that when this happened to a wolfhound, it would eat the silent pup, and never think of it again.
Lady Pendleton failed to see the circle of life in that. She had passed an Overseer and his hound once, and she had put her hand over Custis' eyes so that he may not see the monster, and Annalise and Edwin and Patrick and Dulce and Sebastian sleep sweetly in the family plot.
There are still crushed vipers in the nursery the next day, when Doctor Boretti comes to give his prognosis, and sits watching him twitch helplessly in his crib. The fits, he says, are his body's reaction to the venom. There is, he tells them, a chance – no - a likelihood that the convulsions will kill him and Lady Pendleton should make arrangements. She cries all afternoon, and for most of the night.
Wallace's father tells him that Lady Pendleton is a pathetic woman – he doesn't mean that as an insult, not at all, merely a descriptor of her state – too many dead babes had turned her mind, and the Outsider knew what Treavor had done to her on his way out. (Wallace was seventeen. He remembers the blood.) Lady Pendleton, his father tells him, loves her children very dearly. It just so happens that the energy required to even look at them is beyond her most days.
When Wallace sleeps that night, he hears her sobs in his dreams.
–
Lady Pendleton finally gets her mind together enough to tell the staff that she will be taking Treavor and her lady's maid into the city, to buy Treavor a new suit. 'I want him to look pretty,' she tells them, and every single person in the room silently tags 'in his coffin' to the end of the sentence.
Treavor squirms dreadfully when Maria tries to dress him, and one of his spasming limbs hits her in the face and 'Oh fuck he broke my nose!' 'MARIA!' 'He broke my nose!' - Treavor has indeed broken her nose, it gushes thick blood down her tidy outfit and into her mouth and she sobs and curls into a ball on the floor, and Treavor has one arm in his jacket and looks utterly terrified. Higgins doesn't even get to the same floor as them before he calls for Wallace to get some ice or a towel or something, dammit, and Wallace dabs at Maria's face and the carpet and straightens Treavor's collar while his father talks in a hushed, calm voice to the hyperventilating Lady Pendleton.
'Wallace!' he calls eventually, and Wallace stands tall and tries not to look scared, 'You will handle young Treavor for her Ladyship when she visits the city.'
'Higgins, are you sure Wallace is -'
'Lady, I know that Wallace will keep your son from harm. He is gentle, but he is strong. He'll do well.' There is such pride in his father's voice then that Wallace burns, and by the void, he'd take a gun to the head, he'd take a knife to the eye for little Treavor Pendleton if it would make his father speak like that about him.
'Very well, then. Ah, well, Wallace – we'd best be off.'
-
Wallace has never in his maddest dreams been sitting in a carriage with her Ladyship and the lady's maid and a boy who will be a Lord one day. His mother is a cook. They sit in silence, her Ladyship looks stoic – dead inside, really – and the maid is nervous, and Wallace holds both of Treavor's hands to stop him scratching at the viper bites under his clothes – oh, he struggles against him briefly, but it is something other than resignation that stops him and lets Wallace sit there with his one big hand clasped over his own.
When they reach the tailor, it's getting dark, and the whale lamps are already lit. The tailor looks at Treavor's dour bitten face, ruffles his hair and offers him a smile. 'Been in the wars, little man?' Lady Pendleton asks for something in black, and her smile disappears.
It's customary for children to be buried in mourning – for their own lives, you see - and since the revolution there have been enough awful industrial accidents involving them that the tailor can whip out any number of pre-cut, pre-pinned outfits that need only a little taking in to fit horribly perfectly.
'You're a young man, Wallace, I suppose you know the fashions. Which pin with the cravat?' Lady Pendleton isn't so old herself, though. She was still a teenager when she had married his Lordship, and oh how the nobles had gossiped about that. Even now, she can barely be ten years older than Wallace. The pins are near-identical anyhow, silver, but where one has a neat enamel dahlia, the other has a simple green stone, set in jet.
Wallace looks over at Treavor, who is pouting miserably as the tailor marks up his sleeves in chalk. Black suits him less well even than the pinks and whites and ridiculous sailor costumes that are somehow still fashionable when the twins wore them however many years ago.
'Green,' he says eventually, 'it's a half-mourning colour.'
Lady Pendleton gives him a sad little smile. 'Correct choice.' she looks at the floor and swallows, and Wallace is terrified that she's going to start crying, he wonders if this is what she does alone in the east wing every day, and she chews at her lip and whispers, 'you will look after him, right? I mean... if he does... before he does... I don't think I...' her breath hitches, and Wallace passes her his only clean handkerchief and the blossoms her make-up forms over it don't soil it at all in his eyes.
Wallace remembers carrying in firewood and cleaning broken glass and bringing his Lordship the newspaper when his father's shattered thigh-bone couldn't take the strain of walking the hallway. He remembers fetching hot water and boiling blood from towels on a stormy night five years ago and he remembers his father, that morning, and he looks at the little boy in the beautiful morbid suit, and finds a sudden purpose, however short it might last him.
'My Lady, I would be honoured.'