Author's Note: What can I say? I'm a sucker for sidekicks. This is a little Suzanne soliloquy, inspired by the sight of three random and clearly unrelated guys walking to a bar, footsteps matched and arms swinging in perfect unison. It struck me as the sort of thing Andrew and Percy would do, and the sort of thing Andrew's wife would notice and think about, accustomed as she is herself to being the supporting friend.
He is leaving me, pushing away and then reaching back again as I shove him away myself and then draw him in. But there is not enough time, there is never enough time, and so one last kiss, one last handclasp and he is gone with my "Godspeed..!" echoing in an already empty room.
I can hear his footsteps pounding as he descends at a run, for he has stayed too long at this farewell and we both know it. Sir Percy knows it too, waiting just outside, visible from the windowseat as I swallow through my suddenly too-small throat and cross the room to look out. He is obviously impatient but not put out -- there is something so innocuous about his fidgeting, as if he is a child in anxious attendance on a playmate and not a hero taking my husband to what is perhaps his death.
Andrew turns back after he emerges and waves up at where he knows I am. But it is a passing, an almost cavalier wave, for all its tenderness -- the real grief and sincere passion that burned, not moments ago, in his eyes, have already sunk beneath the lust for adventure and the sweet subtle thrill at the noble work to be done. The Scarlet Pimpernel looks at me too, glancing up at the window and the drawn curtain, and with one hand lifts his hat -- not so much, I think, out of respect and etiquette, but rather to allow me to draw from his gaze the same constant promise, his vow to at any redeemable price return to me the man I love.
Do they even know what near comrades they are, as they turn toward the horses held a few metres away? They know they care for each other as fellow-soldiers and as friends, that each would lay down his life cheerfully for the other and consider the vast debt owed to the intimacy but paltrily paid. But perhaps the true nature of such a bond can be visible only to eyes outside it; perhaps those countless miniscule signs by which they tell each other of the unspoken connection are rather hard to pinpoint. Particularly for a man. Most particularly for an Englishman.
They walk together, although Andrew's legs are so much shorter than Percy's; they move with the same easy gait, a fraction quicker than I have seen one walk alone and a fraction slower than I have seen the other, and each right and left foot lands at the instant as its fellow, two subdued paces sounding as one. Sometimes I try to wonder what it was like, the first time they walked together. Did they hold an awkward, halting conversation, more occupied with staying together than speaking together, Percy concentrating on taking inept, uncomfortably short strides while Andrew grew out of breath from a steady jog? Or did they make their way home from that first chance meeting already fitting together perfectly, footsteps flawlessly matched?
Andrew has, and has had I daresay all his life, a way of running his hand along the side of his head, fingertips along the scalp line, to smooth his hair into place. Percy has this same habitual gesture, and yet his shining silken waves have no propensity, as my husband's have, to burst perversely out into frazzled cloudpuffs or unwind into ambitious tendrils that snatch at every fickle butterfly breeze. My husband raises his head a little to examine anything the littlest bit above eye level, and yet his eyes are not perpetually half-closed as his leader's are. Their arms swing in perfect unison, lace rising and falling from four wrists with the same motion, and as they reach the steeds, although they mount in different fashions, each settles into the saddle with an identical fluid twist.
This eerie sameness is beautiful, and yet it does not reassure me; no renewed conviction of Percy's undoubted affection for my lover buoys up my faith in his safety. It is rather a feeling of loss, a sense of sudden terror at the realization that it is this man, with his mission to save the world and perhaps die in the attempt, who has so unconsciously and irrevocably completed that one part of Andrew's nature that it is not my province to fulfill. There is a segment in each of these two souls that is hidden from me and from Marguerite, something meant to enthrone beneath their God not a wife or a child but only the brother-in-arms that each has found in the other. Those two segments have intermingled until there is a knot that even the most deft and patient fingers could not pick apart; Percy makes Andrew bolder, stronger, quicker to laugh and slower to weep, and Andrew makes Percy humbler, gentler, quicker perhaps to smile and pray and slower to judge and condemn.
It is that, and not what he has done for my family, for me or for anyone else, that makes it impossible for me to hate the man who takes from me the man I am a part of, that would make it impossible for me to hate him even if -- or when -- he brings home to me not an eager husband but a vacant corpse. It is that knowledge that looses my clinging arms when Andrew is summoned, and that makes me greet with a handclasp and a kiss the half-acknowledged trepidation in Marguerite's eyes whenever we speak of our husbands. I cannot hate Sir Percy Blakeney, or even the Scarlet Pimpernel, because, whether he knows it or not, whether he will or no, Sir Andrew Ffoulkes is within him, as Sir Percy is in Sir Andrew.
And when I wake tonight, with my prayers choked in my throat and my foresight blinded by my tears and the selfishness of earthly love a dense aura that makes it hard to breathe, it will not be the image of hundreds of grateful compatriots, nor even that of Andrew's visage flaming with loyalty and admiration of his friend, that will crack the intolerable tension in my chest and let me pray and sleep. I love Sir Percy as my companion and my saviour, as the friend of my lover and the lover of my friend; but when France is millions of miles away, and the empty room down the hall intolerably close, and everything poor and mean and weak inside of me surges up in an intolerable longing for what I want and need and to the devil with the rest of the world…
In that moment, I know that relief, forgiveness, and resignation will come not through thoughts of the greater good or a noble mission but through the simple, vivid picture of four arms swinging in unison, and the remembrance of light glinting off a ring on a slender hand raised to unconsciously smooth down already satin hair.