Title: A Shoulder to Lean On
Fandom: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Rating: PG
Length: 698 words
Content notes: Contains off screen character death and mention of period typical attitudes to sexuality
Author notes: Set in the Ungentlemanly Warfare universe
Summary: Artie realises something about Arthur and William’s relationship





The first time that Artie realises the nature of his father's relationship with William is the day that William's own father dies.

The telephone call seems unimportant at first, his father excusing himself to answer it as he always does if it rings. The calls are usually for him; the work he never talks about does not keep to set hours. Artie wouldn't have thought anything of it apart from the tone of his father's voice when he calls William from the room. It’s somewhere between an adult’s awareness and a child’s intuition that tells him to keep half an ear on the conversation, not able to hear the words but aware that something serious must be happening.

He knows it's wrong to eavesdrop but still he finds himself drawn to the door, peering round into the hall and fearing the worst even though he isn’t sure what the worst would be. William is sitting on the chair by the telephone, hunched over. Artie cannot see his face but that posture tells him everything he needs to know. His father is kneeling in front of William, with a hand on his arm, and as Artie watches he pulls him forward, tucking William’s head into the crook of his shoulder and holding him there.

It could have meant nothing. Certainly when he finds out what has happened, when William is packing and they are waiting for the taxi to take him to the station to catch a train home, it doesn’t seem so strange that William might need comfort or that Artie’s father might offer it. But somehow, in that moment, he knows it is more.

Afterwards, lying in bed and unable to sleep despite how late it is, he cannot stop thinking about it. He has never seen a grown man cry before. Not even his father when their mother died. It runs round in his head, what it means that William could cry. He sees over and over again the way that William had leaned on Arthur, the tenderness of it. It’s shocking, but there’s also a kind of rightness to it, something that falls into place in his mind.

There’s fear as well, all the schoolboy comments he’s ever heard and the fact that his own father is doing something illegal, something that people call sinful. It changes what he thought he knew about his father, about his parents’ marriage. It changes something that he knows about himself.

He gets up, unable to bear staying in bed any longer. His father is in the hall again as he comes down the stairs, holding the phone to his ear. It must be William, Artie realises, calling to say that he has arrived. His father looks up at him and he knows.

“Sleep as well as you can then,” his father says, and then, very deliberately, “I love you.”

He puts the phone down. Artie hesitates, half way down the stairs with his hand running over the smooth wood of the bannisters for comfort. He doesn’t know what to say. It’s too much to take in, all at once. Too much to know he was right, too tangled up to know if he wants to ask first about his mother or whether he ought to say something else. To say that it’s alright. If it is alright, which he thinks it is. He likes William after all. Although he’d never thought of him in that way, as someone his father loves.

His father is watching him, very calmly and without saying a word. It steadies him, even though his father’s watchful eye usually makes him flustered.

“So,” his father says, “I suppose you’d like to talk?”

“Yes,” Artie says, feeling something shift in the air between them. This isn’t going to be the usual kind of ‘serious talk’, he realises, but something more equal. Something his father is trusting him with. “Is William alright, Dad?” he asks as he descends the last few stairs, because the asking matters. It seems to be the right thing to say because his father smiles then, a proper smile.

“He will be,” he says, and his hand on Artie’s shoulder is warm.