Chapter Text
~* June, 1966 *~
The shadow beside her didn't smile -- she'd have heard something crack if it had done -- instead, Edwin Jarvis leaned one well-pressed arm along the bar and loomed closer. "Mrs. Sloane."
April cut a glance at him and smirks. "Jarvis. Come for the wedding?" she leaned back to wave a hand at the crowded bar full of people in their very best clothes. Jarvis in his everyday suit was better dressed than any of them, while she, in work shirt and levis, with her hair escaping confinement to curl in her eyes, looked fit to be chased to the curb at any moment. "Looks like quite the party," April mused, watching a flock of miniskirted bridesmaids in buttercup yellow giggle off to the toilet together. "Are you with the Bride's, or the Groom's folk?"
Jarvis was having none of it though. "No, I've not come for the wedding, Mrs. Sloane, any more than have you."
"Well I know you've not come for the ale..." She gave a snort and sipped her beer -- a gutless, fashionably American brew, half froth and far too cold, but cheap enough to do the job eventually. Money she shouldn't be spending, but it was better than watching Truth or Consequences, which was playing in the television lounge.
"I've come to ask you not to resign," Jarvis said, his eyes grave, worried, and uncomfortably blue.
"Hmph," she said. "Well congratulations; you've managed it. Well done, you." Then she turned back to the bar and waited for him to leave.
And so, of course, he did no such thing. "Perhaps I've misspoken," he said, pulling out the barstool next to her and climbing astride it. "What I meant to say was that I have come to convince you not to resign."
"Can't." April shook her head as the Beatles took over the jukebox to announce that they could work it out. "Can't be done," she said, to him and to them and to the whole damned world, and most of all, to herself.
"Even so." The reply was just as implacable as she'd expected, but a pleading note tinted the next words like ink in clear water. "You mustn't leave, April -- not at all, but most certainly not now, with summer just around the corner. You know you're desperately needed-"
She drowned a curse in her pint glass, then drained it in three long pulls and smacked it down on the bar. The barkeep might have looked young, but his Pavlovian response to the empty 'toc' was instant. "Two more of the same," April growled at him, "And whiskey to follow. Neat. The Jameson." Again, it was swill, but she'd chosen the hotel for price, not quality, and her days of drinking only the best were most likely behind her now.
"There's nothing desperately about it, Edwin Jarvis," she said once the boy had set their drinks up and left. "I am a bloody cook. A cook and a skivvy-herder. You can hire five more just alike, only younger and of sweeter temperament at half what I'm paid to do the work. If you let Stark do his own interviewing, there's a good chance they'll even wear heels and short skirts as well. And it's no good you looking constipated and disapproving at me," she added with a glare, "you know he would do!"
But the pained, patient frown didn't waver, even as Jarvis picked up the glass of beer and sipped, saying, "I'm merely waiting for you to finish demeaning yourself."
April grit her teeth at that. "Aye, well I have. That's why I've quit, isn't it?"
There at last was the flash of anger she'd expected in Jarvis' blue eyes. "You know very well how important you are to the Stark household, Mrs. Sloane," he clipped, "entirely leaving aside your work managing the household staff and kitchens. April, you know what you mean to her-"
She cut him off with a laugh, bitter, thin, and like the beer, too cold. "Oh aye. I do know that, don't I?"
Jarvis watched her, silent, inscrutable, and ferociously patient. After a long moment and too much Paul McCartney, April sighed and scrubbed at her face with both hands. "Maria's pregnant again, Jarvis," she said through her fingers.
Anyone else might have read nothing into Jarvis' blink, but to April, it was as good as a flailing gasp. She huffed a laugh that was hollow and dry, and nodded her head. "Oh, it's sure enough. Three weeks past her monthly, and in that time she's not kept a bite down beyond weak tea and dry toast. She knows it, too. Makes a mess of her plate at dinner and eats not a bite, so no one will ask and she won't have to say so yet. Doesn't want to jinx it." Her lip curled hard to let the words get out.
At last, the old butler's face thawed enough to allow a slow lift of his eyebrows, and a tiny smile. "Ah," was all he said.
She scowled. "What?"
Jarvis turned his glass in place on the bar. "Surprising that jealousy should rear its head this far along, but..."
"Jealousy!" April turned on him, forcibly restraining her outrage, or at least her volume as the wedding crowd's din went briefly quiet and curious. "You sanctimonious bastard, it's murdering rage, is what it is!" she hissed. "It's Howard sodding Stark, who can remember the anniversary, birthday, favorite drink and whore of choice of every General on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and half of Congress, but can't be arsed to remember to put on a rubber!" She took a hasty gulp to loosen the knot in her throat.
"Six months ago that miscarriage nearly killed her, Jarvis! Maria was a mess afterward, miserable and heartsick, barely got out of bed for weeks, not that Howard noticed. But when the doctor told them it was too risky for her to try for another baby, he was bloody well there!"
"And she will not, I daresay, consider a termination?" Jarvis murmured, in the voice of a man who already knew the answer to his question. The jukebox wailed that it knew she wanted to leave, but refused to let her go.
She laughed lest she snarl, and let the damned thing get to its begging. "Maria's taken a notion that if she can only give Howard a son to carry on his empire, he'll love her. She'd sooner die trying than risk him divorcing her for one of his party girls."
There, at last, the old hound roused himself to his master's defense. "Mr. Stark has better sense than that, I should think," Jarvis huffed. "He is, at very least, conscious of the power of scandal."
"When he's sober, perhaps," April allowed, "but how often is that these days?"
Jarvis tipped a meaning glance toward the glasses, pint and shot, at April's elbow. She glared straight back at him until he picked up his own pint and sipped. "Mrs. Sloane," he said, then drew up and began again. "April, Stark Manor has been your home for five years now. You've no family of your own in the States, and you can hardly return to Belfast. Where will you go if you do leave? Most nations do have extradition treaties with the UK these days, after all."
"Pfft." She dismissed his concern with a hand wave. "I was a child then, and a minor player in all that business besides. The warrant didn't stop me getting out of Ireland, what makes you think it'll trouble me now the crown's got bigger game to hunt?" Besides, she was closer with Charles' family than she'd ever been with her own, and they were no farther than Boston.
"The fact that your soon-to-be ex-employer has friends in Parliament, and is not well known for his forgiving nature," he replied, all eyebrow before she could say so. "Mr. Stark tends to be, you may remember, demonstrably vindictive when slighted."
Sodding vicious, more like, and petty and cruel besides. Still, she rolled up one shoulder in a shrug. "To my knowing, Howard Stark doesn't trouble himself over what I do, so long as his dinner's on time and his messes tidied up after he's finished making them."
Jarvis was too polite to roll his eyes, but she could tell it was a very near thing. "Mr. Stark cares very much what you do, April Sloane, or have you been operating under the delusion that the man has been somehow unaware of the affair you've been carrying on with his wife lo these four years past?"
She didn't glance around the bar to see who'd heard. She didn't hiss at him to keep his voice down. She didn't even flinch, just picked up her beer, sipped, and swallowed. "Being aware of a thing doesn't mean he gives a damn about it."
"Headstrong, obstinate girl! You make Maria happy!" he spat, anger breaking all at once through the implacable facade he cultivated so carefully. But even furious, Jarvis was restrained, not quite hiding hurt and worry beneath the anger's veneer. "You care for her, sustain her, and look after her in ways he knows he cannot, and Mr. Stark values that, however poor he might be at demonstrating his appreciation."
"However little he cares to bother showing it, more like," April answered back as, on the jukebox, Sinatra's girl began to brag about her boots.
"He trusts you to shore up his marriage to a woman nearly half his age," Jarvis said, emotions back in control, mask back in place, though just enough askew to let concern and disappointment show about the eyes. "Take that away at a time when you know the results will be catastrophic for the family, and you must expect to encounter the very worst of Mr. Stark's infamous temperament."
"And there's the difference between us, Jarvis," April said through her teeth. "I don't give a fart in a windstorm for the worst of Howard Stark's temper. I'm not afraid of him." And she wasn't, that was the thing. For all his rages, tempers, and extravagant gifts, for all his manic hours, madcap antics and mountebank's flashover charm, April Sloane had never found Howard Stark more intimidating than any other spoiled toddler who liked his own way enough to pitch a wobbly every time he thought he might not get it. She'd no trouble telling the man so to his face, and Jarvis knew it, too. Interposed himself between April and her employer on a regular basis, lest she serve Howard up the sharp edge of her tongue, and often took the raking himself in the interest of letting her dump steam before she blew.
The pinched set of his lips was just the same now, for all his message was different. "Then if you're spoiling so for it, go and have your swing at him in person, for heaven's sake," Jarvis said. "Smash in his nose if you've something to prove, but don't cut the nose off your own life -- your own love just to spite him!"
April, said nothing to the dare, just drank down half her beer with a grimace. Jarvis was smiling when she put her glass down, but it was a sad little thing, pointed with regret. "Ahh," he sighed as Nancy and her boots walked off together. "That's the real reason then."
"I've told you the reason, you ponce."
"You've talked around it, more like," he answered, unruffled. "You mightn't be afraid of Howard, but Maria terrifies you."
April watched the mirror behind the bar, her fingers folded neat and tight and not fidgeting at all. A drunken groomsman in a yellow cumberbund was trying to stare down the bride's mother's décolletage, much to the woman's delight.
"You care for her," Jarvis went on, mercilessly kind. "That's clear to anyone who sees you together. You love her, and she you, but you've just realized that you could lose her despite it all. And that's put you into full, scrambling retreat."
"Bollocks," she managed.
Jarvis took hold of her chair and pulled April around on it so that she must face him, meet his challenging stare, or else by the tilt of her chin, admit that she feared to. "Then why, pray tell, are you running away when you've nothing whatsoever to run to?" he asked.
The jukebox unfairly began to croon in harmony of railway stations, and longing for home, and April knocked his hand from her chair with a snarl. "I'm not running away, damn you, I just haven't the stomach to watch it. I can't watch her die, Jarvis!" She had to stop as the word broke apart in her throat, had to swallow against the bleeding-sharp shards of it. "Not again, not so damned senselessly. Not for nothing."
He scanned her face for a long moment, long enough that the welling of tears could subside, and the damned song could begin to itch between her shoulders. "And if this child lives?" he asked her just as she was preparing to go put a shoe through the damned jukebox once and for all. "If Maria is able to give Howard a son, is it still for nothing?"
A fair question, though not so pointed as he hoped. April curled her lip at it. "If the birth kills her and leaves the poor little bastard with Howard alone, it's little better than nothing in my book."
One black eyebrow winged upward at that, and Jarvis flicked her a knowing smile as he reached for his beer. "Alone, you say? And your leaving now will prevent this how, exactly?" The amusement in his voice was thin, sharp, and hollow – it was the disappointment behind it that cut her to the bone.
"Damn you, what would you have me do?" April cried. "Stand by and watch it all over again? Hover and coo and change the bloody bed sheets while she's wasting away, turning green and sick and hollow day by day? Make chicken soup while the one bloody thing I've wanted for myself -- the one soul in all the world worth a damn to me, rots away before my eyes?"
She shook her head and choked down her beer in one long go, swallowing as hard as she could against the words crowding up into her throat. Her voice, when she found it again, was a thin and shaking thing, equal kin to a growl and a whine, and still the best she could do. "It's not a matter of courage, man. It's not a matter of backbone or of heart; it's a matter of stomach." She hit her own for emphasis, the flat of her fist a solid thump against her ribs. "It's a matter of being strong enough, and I'm not, Edwin, I am simply not." Her voice creaked with strain, but the words, now they were flowing, would not be dammed up again. "I can't pretend it doesn't break my heart to leave... to leave Maria, but it would break all of me to stand by, helpless, and just ...watch her die." She shattered on the word, startled and helpless as the tears wrenched free of her grip at last. Furious and humiliated, she stuffed her fist between her teeth to muffle the wretched sounds and wrapped the other arm tight around her belly lest she shake to pieces.
She noticed, on some level, that Jarvis had plucked her out of the chair, tucked her underneath his long arm and led her like a child out of the taproom, but she could not manage overly to care about it. She allowed him to press her down into a quiet, shadowy corner booth in the empty dining room, bawled into her hands while he patted her shoulder and murmured 'there there' at her, and finally accepted his starched and ironed handkerchief when her sobs wound down to sniffles at last.
He slipped away, giving her a bit of privacy to deal with the oceans of snot a hard weep would always bring, and when he returned, brought a tray with white china mugs, steel pots of hot water, and cheap teabags so old their paper wrappers were slightly yellow. Still, he busied himself soberly with the familiar, comforting ritual of making up the tea, his long fingered hands sure and calming over the sugar and milk.
April watched him, her heart sinking lower and lower as she realized that she missed it, the homey familiarity of a proper tea between friends. The way it filled up the silences and gave one's hands something to do while one searched for words, the way it made talking so much easier. She'd left that behind her, coming to the States – had left so very much of herself behind in that long leap across the Atlantic. And now here she stood, toes over yet another cliff, and poised to jump for it. Ready to leave everything she knew behind, and to fly or fall, as luck would have it, and just how many times could she expect to amputate her life before there was nothing left of it to grow back again? And moreover, just how much of the bridge she was hesitating on was already in flames?
She accepted the cup Jarvis passed her, and let the first sip press down her self-pity. "Anyway, you know my temper. It'd be a disaster if I stayed," she told him, aiming for pragmatism. "I'd most likely blow like a mortar under the stress of it and bash Howard's skull in with a kettle one day, and then where'd we be?"
Jarvis snickered over his own cup. "I daresay half the British Home Office knows your temper, April Sloane. It is legendarily explosive, after all." And there, dear heavens, he actually winked at her.
She couldn't restrain a laugh. "No idea what you could possibly be talking about," she said primly as she reached for the shot glass of whiskey he'd brought in with the tray and tipped a little into her tea. Then she sipped again, sighed, and gave up the truth. "And I don't know what else I can do but go. I feel as if I'll run mad if I try and make myself stay."
He plucked the whiskey from her hand as she made to set it aside, and dosed his own cup with a precise, flourishing pour that spilled not a drop. "I'll tell you what you'll do," he said.
April rose to it with a challenging stare. "Oh, and will you now?"
"Yes," he answered, unimpressed, "if you'll but set aside that righteous Irish temper of yours and listen for a minute."
It was such a familiar tone, his superior English exasperation that she couldn't help but smile at it. She hid the expression in her mug though, and waved carelessly for him to carry on. He set aside his cup then, folded his hands on the table, and stared her squarely in the eyes with not so much as a distant rumor of mercy.
"What you'll do is wonder," he said. "If you leave the Stark household today, like this, you'll do very little else for a long time. You'll wonder if Maria is eating, or even trying to. You'll wonder how thin she's gotten. You'll wonder if she's heartbroken over your going, or is putting on a brave face, or merely hiding in her rooms alone for days on end. You'll wonder if she's sleeping, or just pretending to sleep while she cries to herself in her room at night. You'll wonder if anyone is keeping her company while Mr. Stark is away on his yearly arctic venture, for which, I might add, he is scheduled to depart in less than a fortnight."
April sat up at that, her belly clenching. "He'd not go, surely, Jarvis! Not once he knows-"
But he rolled over her objection. "You'll wonder, April. Every day, you'll wonder if she's all right. If she's sick, in hospital; if the diabetes is back again, or if it's preeclampsia this time; if she's bedridden, bleeding, broken, or bored. You'll read the society pages every day with your heart in your throat for nine months, looking for some scrap of news, in case she's lost this baby as well."
She wanted to close her eyes, to shutter out the welling heat of emotion those awful truths were forcing up into her throat, but clung instead, to Jarvis' gun-level stare, watching stubbornly as he broke her heart into ever smaller pieces. "You'll wonder every day if it's happened or not," he went on, neutral, frank, and awful. "And if by some great luck at the end of that time the newspapers tell you that Maria Stark has given her husband Howard the heir they've both hoped for, that both mother and child are well and whole... well. Then, you will spend the rest of your sorry life wondering if you dare try to come back to them again, and what might have been if you had found the strength not to leave in the first place."
And to that truth, April dared say nothing. They both knew he was right, however much she might wish she had it in her to call him a liar. For his part, Jarvis left her to her careful examination of her knotted fingers on the table before her, and calmly, unhurriedly finished his tea while faintly from the taproom, Petula Clark sang a sweet goodnight to her love.
When he set the empty cup and its saucer aside, they both knew he had won. "Take the rest of the week off, Mrs. Sloane," Jarvis told her, unfolding himself from the booth and brushing down his suit coat with efficient hands. "You need it, and I can manage well enough in your absence for that long. Rest. Drink," his mask cracked into a quick, wry smile. "Start brawls if that's what you need to settle yourself. Then come home and tell me your decision on Sunday."
And he might not have said it in as many words, but April could clearly hear what went unsaid beneath the order. 'Don't leave me to carry this mess alone, my ally. If you are not there with me, I don't know how I shall manage...'
"Edwin." April sighed, flexed loose her fingers, and picked up her mug again. The brew within it was still warm, and still held no easy answers. "Is it worth it, do you think? What we do for them, the sacrifices we make so they can have things just the way they like? Does it even make a difference in the end?"
She looked up to find him smiling then, a wry, sad expression, more genuine than any practiced, proper face he would ever show to the world Upstairs. "I've no idea, April," he replied as he turned to go. "Should you reach said end before me, do please let me know what you discover, won't you?"