Chapter Text
Thomas Shelby dreamed often. Mostly nightmares, but sometimes his dreams were so very foreign that he had trouble reconciling them with the realty that he lived. Most days, however, he wished that he never dreamed, for they were never filled with his late wife, but of another woman that he had never laid eyes on a day in his life. He felt sick with himself that he dreamed of someone besides Grace Burgess. He would take the sounds of shovels and the phantom smell of wet earth over the betrayal to her memory any night.
The only redemption he might garner from the situation would be the fact that he only ever observed the female figment and never interacted with her. She tutted about Arrow House as if she were its sole proprietor, in her strange trousers and blouses. Hair in a constant state of mess atop her head and paint upon her face and clothes. Her voice was unknown to him, but her easy smile was not and it was so unlike his deceased wife’s. Everything about this variable ghost was unlike Grace in all that he observed her to do and be.
He watched her lay upon the floor in the sitting room, papers and bits of cloth and swatches of paint surrounding her. He watched her stand before the stately windows, watching the doings of the outside world. He watched her carry a mug that was much too large for her small hands. And he watched her appraise his walls with a keen interest that Tommy did not understand.
Though understanding her was not what Tommy wanted. He wanted to expel her from his mind. To shun her presence and instead dream of the wife that had been so beautiful in both body and soul. This woman, with her deep brown hair and shining sepia eyes was of utmost contrast to Grace and he hated every moment that he spent with his eyes upon her.
But Tommy watched her still in the few hours of rest he found himself in, as he did now. The woman was sitting in her strange trousers, crossed-legged on the floor of the sitting room with several books open around her, studying resolutely and completely ignorant of his presence.
Or so he thought.
Her head snapped up suddenly, eyes staring directly into his own. Her easy smile was nowhere to be seen and her sepia eyes drilled into him with a quality that made him feel like the walls of his home when she regarded them with interest and intensity. She held his gaze for several moments, but then seemed to realize that she was staring at nothing and her gaze drifted hesitantly back to her work. Tommy released a breath that he hadn’t known he was holding. That had been the first time that she had ever so much as acknowledged him being in her presence.
Many more such instances would follow.
Her eyes found him so often now that he wondered if she had ever been ignorant of him in the first place. Now her copper gaze followed him about the room and her nicely shaped brows would quirk when he scowled at her, but no matter how often she found him, she would eventually go back to her task as if he had never so much as set foot in front of her. He was beginning to think that he was the ghost.
Tommy’s anger about her continued invasion of his sleeping hours found a place in how he regarded her. She watched him now, with his drawn brows and piercing gaze, and Tommy had officially had enough. Without dragging his imperious look from her, he reached out and slung the ornamental clock from the mantel. The crash brought her to her feet, stance defensive and eyes wide. The satisfaction of her reaction shouldn’t have pleased him this much, but it did.
It was short lived, however, her attention wavered as it always did and it was as if he no longer existed. But he observed her, picking up the mangled pieces of the clock with a look on her face of brief confusion.
Their next encounter was just as surprising as their last, and not just for the woman. She was sitting calmly with her back against the solid sitting room wall, pouring studiously over the materials before her. Tommy wanted to disrupt her as she disrupted him and had thrown a vase to shatter against the wall over her head.
The fine China rained down upon her. Her small hands tucking her head to protect herself from the sharp and heavy pieces that exploded just above her. Once the noise and shock wore off, she uncurled herself, breathing heavily. Her eyes like polished copper looked at the wreckage and then flipped to where the vase had previously sat so very innocently.
Tommy watched as an emotion he had yet to see appeared on her face. She rose fluidly from the floor, bare feet careful of the debris and polished copper eyes trained unflinchingly upon Tommy’s person, he was sure of it. Her anger was like a physical force and Tommy relished the reaction he had garnered from her usually calm and impassive countenance when faced with his attempts to flush her from his mind and his home.
Her face was pinched in fury and if they were closer than the span of the room that separated them, he was sure she would try to strike him, instead it was her words that reached him. “You miserable sonofabitch. Here you are, some worthless blight upon the halls of this home, trying to run me out without any kind of consideration of what I’m even trying to do here.” She paused, her voice controlled in the same way her rage seemed to be. “Your manners and your supposed intellect had best be found before our next encounter, otherwise I’ll fucking torch this place and collect the insurance money.”
With her threat made, she walked from the room and passed no further judgements upon Thomas Shelby, not even a single glance. He hoped she’d sliced her foot open in her retreat, but found no evidence of blood upon the floor in her wake.
The words she had spoken to Tommy stayed with him into his waking hours. She’d called him a miserable sonofabitch and Tommy had to agree, he’d been miserable for most of his life and he didn’t see that changing in the foreseeable future. Then she had accused him of being a blight upon the halls of his home and he bristled with indignation. Who the fuck was she, figment of his imagination or not, to wrought ill upon his character within his own mind? But the most curious thing had been her assertion that he didn’t understand her presence.
But he did. She was some figment that his mind had cooked up to distract himself from Grace’s absence and he wanted rid of her. So her threat would not be heeded and he’d throw whatever he damn well pleased until she no longer haunted him. He wanted Grace’s ghost to take up the hours he slept, not some mess of a woman that didn’t even know how to sit in a fucking chair.
Noble Lee King wondered for the umpteenth time what she was doing here. In England. In this giant fucking house that was decidedly haunted by some asshole ghost with some kind of vendetta against her. But she had seen enough episodes of Ghost Hunters and other paranormal shows to know that when you started restoring or renovating old homes it made the resident spooks roll in their graves and like a blast from the past, they appeared like Casper the Friendly Ghost’s disgruntled uncles to run the flesh-bag straight out of Dodge.
She thought back to the first several times she had noticed the specter that liked to stare hatefully at her. She always smelled him before she saw him, straight tobacco and a masculine combination of aftershave and the distinct scent of horse. The scent had initially comforted her. It reminded her of her grandfather Percy back in Kentucky, though her grandfather had the added scent of peppermint oil for his joints.
At first she thought it was merely a lingering scent that old homes seemed to capture, so she paid it little attention, but then she had started noticing shadows and glimpses of movement out of the corner of her eye. This progressed until she could look upon the ghostly body of a man, one she knew from the research she had done on Arrow House, and the look on his face had been anything but kind as he gazed down on her.
Disinterest and anger dominated the air around him when he appeared to Noble Lee. She thought it could only be because she had taken up residence in his previous home, which she had acquired by the last will and testament of her late grandfather on her father’s side. Her grandfather, Regal Lee King, had no other grandchildren, and with Noble Lee’s profession as a historic restoration specialist, he had deemed it only suitable for neglected Arrow House to fall to her.
And Noble Lee, after much contemplation, had decided to move to the United Kingdom in order to restore the estate to its former glory and reap the benefits from such a venture. Historic homes, especially those as large and stately as Arrow House, often garnered museum standards and film opportunities. So Noble Lee had finished her latest project and migrated to take up the task laid before her.
What she hadn’t accounted for was the Arrow House ghost, Thomas Shelby, to be such a temperamental bastard. His glares scorched her flesh when he set his eyes upon her, and his anger had only seemed to grow as she progressed in her restoration ventures to the estate. Which, she honestly thought was a dramatic overreaction, since she was putting the house to rights in the era in which Thomas Shelby had owned it. His ownership had been the most significant and she reckoned it would garner the most profit.
Now she was beginning to think her efforts were going to be thwarted by a disgruntled phantom gangster and honestly, she figured that was the worst type of ghost to piss off. Their last encounter probably hadn’t helped either, seeing as she had threatened to torch his house and collect the insurance money. And she had called him some choice words to boot.
Noble Lee rubbed a hand down her face and hoped the ghost of Thomas Shelby had gotten the message and wouldn’t be throwing household items at her anymore. With that thought, Noble Lee climbed the six foot ladder that she had set up in the den so she could take pictures of the various features of the crown moldings to compare them to the photographs from the era.
With her cellphone in hand, Noble Lee focused on getting a proper picture for her comparison and just as she captured the image, the unmistakable scent of her resident asshole ghost wafted into the room. The licking heat of his gaze on the side of her face wanted to draw her attention away, but Noble Lee was resolute in ignoring him in favor of her task. This, however, proved to be a potentially fatal mistake.
The ladder rocked beneath her and with nothing to grasp onto, Noble Lee pitched backward, a noise of fright escaping her lips unbidden. Her hand clutched her cellphone in her descent and she felt the painful impact of her body hitting the floor. She laid there, half conscious with the weight of the ladder on her legs and her phone biting into the flesh of her hand, wondering vaguely what the fuck that ghost's problem was. As her mind and vision simultaneously became fuzzy, she gazed up at the winter eyes of Thomas Shelby’s ghost until he was a pinprick against the black encroaching around her.