Chapter Text
Joan walked through the flat, glancing into each room as she went, collecting any empties that she found and setting them with a gentle clunk of glass into a cardboard box.
The stragglers who remained at the party were speaking in low and—in some cases—somewhat slurred voices. The music was still playing, but it had been turned down a notch, both in deference to the neighbors and to better suit the party’s newfound mellow mood.
She frowned, considering the state of the place. There wasn’t much more that could be done for now, other than to hope that those who remained would remember to take their stray coats and silk headbands with them when they went.
She deposited the box on the kitchen counter, and then she stopped short, struck by the realization that, in all of her rovings through the flat, Morse had been nowhere to be seen.
She went back down the hall and lowered the volume on the stereo at once.
“Morse?” she called.
There was no answer.
Well.
That was it, then.
Hadn’t she told him, unequivocally, that she would go to have coffee with him? Hadn’t she expressly told the man to stay put?
Beautiful the man may be, but my God, this was too much.
She was spot on in her earlier assessment, after all.
He certainly was an endeavour.
It wasn’t worth it. Not even for all the wavy auburn hair in the world, turning to curls like feathers at his nape, not even for cheekbones so sharp that they begged for her fingertips to trace their lines, not even for that slim physique that even those cheap suits could not hide. Not even for the big blue eyes that seemed to soften and sigh and hang on her every word, ready to crinkle into a smile if she smiled and . . .
“Morse?” she called once more.
Then her eyes fell on the stereo set before her; even with the volume lowered, the low bass was tuned so that that latest by the Rolling Stones was sending the window behind it rattling gently with the beat.
Of course.
She turned and headed up the steps to the next floor, taking them almost two at a time. Then she threw the window at the landing open, letting in a burst of cool air, and climbed through, into the freshness and deepest blackness of the night.
There, on the rooftop, reflected in the dim light of the waxing moon, was a billow of a bright white shirt and a glimmer of red gold hair—Morse, standing with his arms folded, looking up into the starlit sky.
He was standing, not where one might expect, at the edge of the rooftop, where he might better appreciate the view of the marble domes and spires, white against the black, but rather just where he had been standing earlier that evening, at a midpoint somewhere in between the ledge and the window.
Just where she had left him.
It was as if he had, perhaps, been right there, waiting, all of this time.
Suddenly, she couldn't help but remember a day long ago, when the sky had not been black and scattered with stars, but cool and indigo and glowing with the dawn.
"If ever you need anything. . . . Money. A voice on the phone."
"You know where to find me."
And it had been true, what he had told her, and in more ways then one.
It had been true all of this time.
“Morse?” she called.
He turned around at once.
“Ready for the off?” she asked.
He smiled, a fleeting, shy smile, and headed over towards the window.
Towards her.
****
It was a dive of a café, but it was still open—it had that in its favor, at least. The vinyl brown booths and the round, red Formica tables were largely empty, save for one by the window, claimed by a couple in a gown and an evening suit, who must have stopped in after attending some dressier affair—most likely because, just as she and Morse, it was the only place they found to be still open—and a booth in the back corner, where a middle-aged man sat alone, lighting off matches in a matchbook and watching them burn, one by one.
“Well, then?” Joan asked primly, as soon as the young waitress set two white mugs of coffee and a silver pitcher of cream before them.
Morse looked at her, his face impassive.
Of course, he knew just what she was talking about.
Then he furrowed his brow, staring glumly before him, as if he was mulling something over.
“Nine letters,” he said, at last. “Around Eve.”
For a moment, there was a ringing silence.
Dimly, Joan thought she saw just where he was going. But she’d be damned if she was going to let him get there so easily.
Enough games, for the love of God.
“What?” she asked, wryly. “That’s your name? Nine letters, around Eve?”
“No,” Morse said. “It’s an anagram.”
An anagram? Was he joking?
“So what’s this?” Joan asked. “A puzzle, then?”
Morse said nothing, only looked down and ruffled up the hair at the back of his nape.
It was as good as a confirmation.
Christ, he was an awkward sod.
“Around Eve,” she said.
“Mmmmm,” Morse hummed.
Well.
Ok.
Why not?
Joan sighed and pulled a napkin from out of the fingerprint-smudged stainless steel dispensary on the table, ripping it out with more force than was strictly necessary.
“Do you have a pen?” she asked.
“No,” Morse said.
Of course he didn’t. That might make it too easy. She turned to retrieve her purse, which she had slung over the back of her chair, and began to rummage through its contents. It was the damnedest thing. It seemed as if she always had three pens rolling about at the bottom somewhere, at all such times except when she really wanted one.
Miraculously, however, she did find a spare, buried at the bottom amidst a jumble of loose change. She pulled it out and smoothed the napkin out before her, making it into a makeshift piece of paper, before beginning to test various combinations of the five vowels and four consonants he had given her.
“Awfully lot of vowels,” she muttered, half to herself, half in admonishment.
Even that innocent comment, it seemed, was the wrong thing to say—a stricken look passed for a moment over Morse’s pained features, making her to feel for the first time that perhaps—yes—it really was that bad.
It wasn’t long before she began to feel self-conscious; he, of course, was purported to be brilliant at word puzzles, whereas all that she could come up with was that one word that had popped earlier into her mind. All that she could come up with was . . .
She sighed once more, admitting defeat, and placed her pen squarely on the table.
“The only thing I can get is Endeavour,” she said, “and no one is called that.”
Suddenly, Morse ducked his head down, as if fascinated by the contents of his cup, and pulled on his ear.
Her breath caught in her throat.
“It is,” she said. “It’s . . . Endeavour?”
He shrugged one bony shoulder, as if to say that he couldn’t deny it.
Joan couldn’t help but smile, recalling her last thoughts on the rooftop, her thoughts when she had realized he had gone missing from the flat.
Who would have thought it?
He really and truly was an Endeavour.
She looked up to find that Morse . . . No, Endeavour, was regarding her smile warily, his eyes full of that look of retreat, glittering with frost.
He looked down once more into his cup, revealing a crown of unruly waves.
“My mother chose it,” he said, quietly, with a shrug. “She was a Quaker. It’s a virtue name.”
Joan registered his use of the past tense, and at once, the smile died on her face.
She, too looked down into her cup, holding it in both hands so as to have something to do with them.
She hadn’t realized until then, that, in all the years she had known him as her father’s bagman, hovering around the dining room table, or standing gawkily in the hall as she applied her lipstick, she had never heard a thing about his childhood, his family, other than that his father had died a few years ago, and that Dad had gone up north once to see how his protégé was getting on in the aftermath.
Dad hadn't said much, but from what she had gathered, there was some tension there, between Morse and his father.
So. He was quite alone in the world, perhaps. Perhaps had been for some time. Ever since his mother . . .
She could understand, then, why he might guard the name. Such an unusual name must have held a special meaning for her, so much so that it was an expression of her, a piece of her, even, more than it was of him. To laugh at it was to laugh at her, at a woman whom Morse must have loved. And whom he had lost, perhaps at too tender an age.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Morse shrugged.
“You couldn’t have known.”
For a moment, there was a pause, a silence between them.
“How old were you?” Joan ventured at last.
“Twelve.”
Joan rolled the word in her mind. Twelve. That odd age on the cusp of things. When you lived with one foot in the daydreams of childhood and one foot in cold reality. When you began to be old enough to see that so much that went on in the world was hard and cruel and unfair, but when you weren’t yet old enough to know what to do about it, or how to live with it.
“They were divorced, my parents, when I was quite young. . . .” Morse began, and Joan stilled at his words, at information freely given. “I scarcely remember them being married, really. So then I went to live with my father after . . .” He let the sentence drop for a moment, skipping over the words before picking it up again. “With my father and my stepmother. Gwen.”
The tense spaces between the syllables told the tale clearly enough.
It wasn’t a boisterous childhood like her own, then, lived within the heart of a family, with outings to the park and chats at dinner and shouts up the stairs. From a young age, Morse—Endeavour—must have learned to turn within himself, to keep his own company, his own council. The books, the records—it all made sense. Music and poetry had not been mere hobbies, then, but a means of escape from a childhood constructed around a long and seemingly never-ending loneliness.
Morse remained with his gaze cast down and stirred two sugars in his coffee, even though she was quite sure he didn’t drink it so sweet. It was, she understood, merely for something to do under her assessing gaze.
“There,” he said, “now you know all my secrets.”
Joan hummed. Somehow she rather doubted that, but....
What she wanted to say was to ask the question, to ask if they might lower the last barrier.
Could I call you that? Endeavour?
But it was something, she knew, he would not give away too easily, the right to call him by that name.
Still.
He might learn to like it.
If the right person said it.
You know when it’s the right one, after all.
“I didn’t . . . .” she said, and then she took a steadying breath, started over. “I didn’t mean to laugh because I thought the name was funny. It’s just. Well. I was just surprised, is all. By how well it suits you.”
The barest trace of a smile twitched at the corner of Morse’s mouth, causing a quiver in those parentheses-shaped lines that framed his face.
“No,” she said. “It does.”
And truer words were never spoken.
He would never know how much it suited him. It suited him to a perfect tee.
“Endeavour Morse,” she said, rolling the name out grandly on her tongue. “It’s quite dashing, really. It sounds like the name of the hero of a detective show.”
The smiled deepened, grew rueful, as a hint of color flushed his face.
“Rather doubt anyone would want to watch a program about me,” he said.
“I dunno about that,” Joan replied. “Young copper, striving against all odds to bring justice to the city of dreaming spires. That tiger incident might make for a memorable episode.”
Morse looked up, the surprise in his eyes melting the frost back into summer sky blue. “You heard about that?”
Joan raised an eyebrow. “There are some things rather too large for even Dad to keep behind the hall stand.”
Morse snorted.
“Well,” Joan said, briskly, pleased that she had made him smile. “You’ll have to get used to it someday.”
Morse furrowed his brow, confused.
“Your name,” she clarified.
His brow creased further.
“Why?” he asked.
Joan huffed a laugh. “Well. What if you ever marry? Are you going to have your wife call you Morse?”
He looked at her, eyes wide, stunned, as if such a thing had never quite crossed his mind before.
“Awfully frosty, isn’t it?” Joan quipped.
Suddenly her mind flitted about mischievously, as quick as a butterfly, summoning up an image of Morse on his wedding night, with some faceless woman moaning softly in his ear.
“Oh, Morse.”
She ducked her head to stifle her giggle, but then, unbidden, a rush of heat flooded her face.
No doubt because the restaurant was overheated, stuffy and smelling of old fry-up, closed up even on a cool summer night. Why in heaven's name didn’t they think to prop the door?
She cleared her throat and looked up at him to find he was watching her.
To find she was falling into his eyes.
And again, what she wanted to say was, ‘May I call you that?’
What she wanted to say was, ‘You might like learn to like your name, if the right person called it.’
“You’ll know if it’s the right one.”
But instead, she smiled. “Can I ask you something else?”
There was a flicker of worry then, across his expressive face.
“What is it?” he asked, as if bracing himself for the worst.
“Why wouldn’t you simply come stand next to me, on the roof?” she asked.
Morse grimaced.
“I’m . . . I’m a bit off heights, for the moment.”
“Off heights?”
“A case,” he said tersely.
Ah.
Joan could hardly imagine how he might have ended up 'off heights' from a case. What? Had he been chasing someone down over rooftops?
No. Scratch that.
Actually, she quite could understand.
She scowled softly, considering. His standoffishness earlier had nothing to do with her, then. Only with her proximity to the edge of the roof.
When she glanced up, he was watching her almost fearfully, as if awaiting further questioning.
Well. Buggar that.
It wasn’t the bloody Spanish Inquisition.
It could be a two-way street.
Was he going to . . . ask her anything about herself?
“I’ve been working in a bookshop,” she offered.
He startled, but then he seemed to soften, as if realizing he was off the hook, his face relaxing, the two parentheses that had bracketed his wide mouth disappearing into the smooth contours of his face.
“There’s a young girl, who’s always coming in, quite sweet. She’s forever asking me questions about England. Looking things up in books. Birds and trees. Looking at cooking magazines. At maps.”
Morse raised his eyebrows, and, easily, Joan read the question there.
“Her family just immigrated. Kenyan Asians.”
“Ah,” Morse said.
“Anyway,” she said. “It got me thinking and . . . And I started volunteering at the help center round the corner. Just two afternoons a week.”
And here, she hesitated. He had told her something of himself, had given her a secret. It seemed only right that she should reciprocate. But there was always the danger there . . . He had been a college boy. Might he laugh at her? She was only a copper’s daughter, at the end of the day. Might he think her ridiculous? Think she was giving herself airs, striving to reach above her place?
“I met a woman there. Her name’s Viv Wall. And, well, she suggested that . . .”
. . . and why not spit it out?
“She suggested that I go to night school. For social work. So I am.”
She watched his face carefully as she spoke the last words, waiting for him to quirk a smile, or to give her one of the supercilious looks he was so well-known for.
But instead he looked sober, thoughtful, even.
“Well,” he said. “You’d be good at that, wouldn’t you?”
Then he ducked his head and looked back into his cup, holding it in his hands as she held hers.
“You’re good with people,” he said.
And there was a wistfulness there, as he said the words.
As if to say that he was not.
And then it was her turn to feel her face flooding with color, as she looked down into the revolting dregs of her coffee, pleased by the compliment.
Absurdly so.
They were quiet, then, as they finished their coffee.
If that’s what you could call it, of course.
And that was all right.
They had said quite enough to be getting on with.
It wasn’t everything that she wanted to say.
And perhaps it wasn’t everything he wanted to say, either.
But for now, in this moment, it was just enough.
Morse paid the tab as she undid the tangle of her twisted purse strap from the back of her chair. They were just leaving when, at the last moment, she reached over and snatched up the napkin that lay beside her cup, wilting and rumpled with the effort of her pen.
As she tucked it into her bag, she had a vision of herself, of a different Joan, off somewhere in the future, holding this very napkin, and remembering this night, and this man and even this dingy café, and remembering that this was the night that she had first met Endeavour.
****
They walked along the cool pavement, into a sky slowly turning to indigo, and it was the same color it had been on that other morning that . . .
But no.
That was over.
This was just what Morse said it would be.
A fresh start.
They came to a halt before her door, and she turned to look up at him. She thought he might draw nearer, but instead, he remained where he was, a prim few steps away on the pavement.
Of course he did.
He was, after all, the sort to see young ladies safely home.
But then, she couldn’t help but wonder . . . the longing with which he had said those words. You’re good with people.
Morse, it was true, was nothing if not an awkward soul. Could all of his shyness be because . . . was it possible that . . .
Was it possible that he had never even kissed a girl before?
Her eyes darted over his face, assessing his features. The yearning in those big eyes, the twist of his lush mouth would beg to speak otherwise, but from the way he held himself, as if he were a nervous young clerk at a job interview. . . .
Perhaps, if she kept waiting for him to close the gap, she’d be standing on the edge of that rooftop forever.
She would have to show him it was alright. That he could at least take that innocent enough liberty.
She looked up, searchingly into his face. She wasn’t going to say them, the actual words, but, honestly, if even now he couldn’t read the message in her eyes, there was no other hope for him.
“Thank you,” he said. “For the party. And for the coffee.”
Joan quirked a smile, “Not sure if you should thank me for the coffee…”
He grinned and looked away, pulling on his ear. And it was Endeavour’s daffy grin, not DS Morse’s polite and distant smile.
He turned and looked back at her.
And he was looking into her eyes, and she kept looking into his, and what was he waiting for? Did she have to make it any clearer?
Her heart sped up then, began to flutter a little higher under her ribs, because, yes, he actually, finally, was taking one step closer, lowering his face, raising his hands, narrow and sensitive and strong, out to take her shoulders, as lightly as a brush of bird’s wings, pulling her in as he angled his face and brought their lips together in a kiss.
His mouth on hers was soft and insistent, just skimming the hair’s breadth between passion and restraint. Her first conscious thought, when her brain began to work again, was that yes, he had kissed a girl before, he wasn’t the awkward sod she had took him for after all, he knew exactly, exactly what he was doing.
He tilted his head then, in a way that led her to part her lips further, and then he pressed closer, deepening the kiss. It wasn’t the way she’s been kissed before, by blokes who seemed to be in a race with themselves to see how far they could get, as if she herself was immaterial. But softly and slowly, almost too slowly, as if she was the only thing in the world. As if the rest of the dusky street had disappeared around them.
Vaguely, she came to understand, that was just who he was.
He was a man for whom everything was all or nothing.
He had loved someone before to be able to kiss like this, she was sure of it. And she had broken his heart, and he had retreated far within himself. And now, under her gaze, her touch, he was flowing back into life.
It was a heady thought, that she might have such power.
She leaned forward, increasing the pressure between them, and then she raised her hands to run her fingers through the waves just turning to curls at his nape, and they were even softer than she had imagined, the perfect counter balance to the stern lines of his face, the face buried so close to hers. She felt almost as if she needed to hang on to those curls, lest her knees buckle beneath her.
And then he pulled away.
They stood there for a while and said nothing, but surely, she could not hide the stunned look on her face.
He smiled, a bit shyly.
“Well. Good night. Joan,” he said.
“Good night, Endeavour,” she replied.
Because if he thought she was going to call him “Morse” after such a kiss, the man was barmy.
He looked started for a moment, but then he smiled once more.
And then he took a step away, nodding curtly as if to say that he would stand there on the pavement until he was sure she was safely inside.
She returned his smile and turned to the door, managing, thank God, to close it behind her before her face could break into a foolish grin.
He certainly wasn’t as forbidding or austere or as hesitant or shy as his expression might sometimes lead one to believe. Just the opposite.
Morse might appear that way, but Endeavour was a man who, once he fell, fell so hard that he stayed fallen, to the point that he could barely pull himself up again.
But then Joan frowned, softly to herself.
This girl, who had done all this to Morse?
Who the hell could she be?
She slipped off her jacket and hung it on the peg by the door, lost in thought.
Somehow, she very much doubted that she did, indeed, know all of his secrets.