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Polly’s the one who shows them, in the quiet hours before they leave for France. Presses a knife into each of their hands, slips a charm round each neck.
“You take care of each other,” and her voice is shaking, her hands are shaking. “If you’re hurt – if you’re dying – you end it quick and you stay alive.”
Arthur laughs all the way to the docks, all the way across the Channel: “She’s losing it, boys,” he says, as the boat rocks them. “Pol’s gone fucking mad.”
But then they’re under the ground, deeper than a grave, with two dead Germans and John gut-shot, bleeding out into the mud. Arthur’s tearing at his hair – “Fucking help him, Tommy, fucking do something” – and John’s gasping, choking, dying, the charm in the hollow of his throat, glinting in the half-light, and Tommy reaches in his pocket and it’s there, that knife, curled up and waiting.
“Jesus,” Arthur’s groaning, shirt off, trying to stop the bleeding, “Tommy, what’re you doing? We got to get him up, we got to get a doctor –”
John’s looking up at him and he’s got that look in his eyes, the one all dying men get when it’s almost over, but he’s smiling: “Tommy,” he breathes, and there’s blood on his teeth, on his lips, “Fucking do it, man.”
His hands shake when he opens the blade out, presses it up to the soft curve of John’s throat, feels his windpipe bump against the blade. Bloody work this, but no bloodier than what they came down here to do. He slits his brother’s throat, watches John die choking and painful in his arms.
“Oh, fuck.” Arthur touches John’s face, smearing blood across his cheeks, and his breathing is ragged, chased by sobs. “Is he – Tommy, is he – oh, fuck, John boy, what did you –”
“Shut up, Arthur.” It’s harsher than he means, but their brother’s lying cold between them and there are no guarantees with this kind of witchcraft. “Just wait.”
They wait and they wait and they wait, until somewhere up the tunnel are voices, boots thudding in the mud. Won’t be long until the boys reach them, find two dead Germans and one dead Shelby, and there’s no hiding this once they get him out in the open air.
“Sergeant Major,” someone calls down, “You all right down there?”
No answer: Tommy’s waiting, still waiting. No fucking guarantees, and he’d curse the gypsy part of him for the hope that’s dying like the light in their lamps – except there: a twitch, a flicker: John’s hand moving in the mud, the glint of light on his eyeballs, and then his chest heaves and he’s breathing, gasping in the muggy tunnel air.
“Tommy,” and now the voices are closer he can hear it’s their Danny shuffling down towards them; “You better not all be fucking dead, Polly’ll kill me if I go home without you.”
And he looks at Arthur, tears streaking through the dirt on his face, and John, blood on his teeth and his face and his clothes but alive, and he tilts his head back against the wall, thinks Pol’s gone fucking mad, and he laughs and laughs and laughs.
Lucky, the boys in their unit call them. The luckiest bastards in all of France.
The Small Heath Rifles go over the top and the Shelby boys stumble back out of No Man’s land, covered in blood, uniforms torn to pieces on barbed wire, but no worse for wear. The Krauts’ break into their tunnel in a hail of dirt and bullets and the Shelby boys walk away, bloody, bruised – but still breathing. The 179th gets buried under a thousand pounds of earth and the Shelby boys come crawling out of that grave, charms around their necks and dirt in their lungs.
“You boys got a guardian angel,” someone says as they lay in the crater, hands bloody and raw, spitting soil from their mouths. “Maybe share her around a little, eh?”
And Tommy looks at Arthur and John, all of them shell-shocked, faces blackened with dust and gunpowder, and feels hysteria bubbling up in his chest because it’s no luck. It’s no angel. They’ve made a deal with the devil, and now he’s curled around their hearts, keeping them beating for his own purpose.
It’s no luck. No goddamn luck at all.
They come back different, everyone says.
Those Shelby boys always had short tempers and hollow eyes, but now people are scared. Now people step out of their way, pull their kids behind them like they can protect them from the devils that walk their streets.
Tommy puts them out of his head – focuses on his business, on his bookies and his cash, on his family and his empire, slowly inching out of Small Heath, created by nothing but sheer will.
But he can’t forget it, that feeling, like he’s still got mud in his lungs, a bullet in his gut. It sits there, festering, rotting him from the inside. Can’t get it out, no matter how many cigarettes he smokes or bottles he drinks. Can’t get it out, even when he puts the pipe to his lips and breathes in so deep it echoes through his chest like a death-rattle.
One night Polly finds him gasping and twitching on the floor, pipe still clutched in his hand, air thick and heady. There’s nothing gentle in the way she yanks him up and slaps him, the opium disappearing into the folds of her dress.
“Enough, Tommy.” She’s close enough that he can smell her perfume. “You didn’t survive the war to kill yourself with this.”
A laugh bubbles up in his throat, hysteria bleeding around the edges. Did she see it? The way he overloaded the pipe, the way he marched to the edge and threw himself over, desperate and deliberate. The way he clawed himself back up the cliff to the bedroom floor.
There’s nothing that can kill him now.
Her hand closes over his neck, over the charm. “Enough,” she says again, and there’s something like pity in her voice, something like regret.
When he speaks his voice is raw. “You shouldn’t have given us them, Pol. It’s not right.”
“It’s not Christian, you mean.” She laughs, but there are shadows in her eyes to match his own. “It got you home, didn’t it?”
Rage floods through him, a bitter aftertaste, but he’s so empty he can barely even lift his open his eyes to glare at her.
“Did you even know if it’d work?”
Polly’s eyes cut away, shamed. “We needed you to come home. Ada, Finn – we needed you. I would’ve tried anything to make that happen.”
And there’s the rub. He can hate what they’ve become – hate the way Arthur looks at him, at everyone, wide eyed and terrified and desperately trying to hide it; hate how John rubs at his neck over and over and over, fingers searching for a scar that doesn’t exist; hate his aching bones, his hollow chest, his broken heart – but he can’t regret it. He can’t regret coming back in once piece.
Whatever’s on his face makes Polly tuck herself into his side, cradle his head against her shoulder. They breathe together, in-out, in-out, that familiar perfume washing away the tar-scent of the opium.
“What’s it like?” she whispers as he’s drifting, slowly winding down from the adrenaline.
“You’ve never done it?”
“Haven’t needed to.” She brushes her lips over his forehead. “Yet.”
When they were kids they used to suck petrol out of cars, and Tommy thinks it’s like that, like something slick and poisonous in your mouth and throat. Like something no amount of whiskey will ever wash out.
A charm for Finn and a charm for Ada. One for Polly, for Charlie, for Curly. For Danny, oh so helpful when his brains need scattering in the cut. For John’s brood but not his new wife; she already has one hanging between her breasts.
“Queen Mary told me I’d be needing one,” she says and flashes her teeth.
A charm for Grace too – not at first, not when she’s singing songs about heartbreak, but later, when she’s wearing a red dress, when she’s shooting a man, when she’s laughing into his mouth. When he realises he’ll die if she dies, his heart tied tight to hers.
She laughs at the little piece of gold he puts in her hand, lays it on the bar between them. “I don’t want jewellery from you, Thomas.”
It sits there, so innocent, so innocuous. He takes a slow drag of his cigarette, like that’ll calm the frantic beating of his heart.
“What do you want from me then, Grace?”
She laughs again, and he can’t look away from her: light catching in her eyes, the flash of teeth in her smile. Her hair the same colour as his charm.
“Everything, Tommy. I want everything.”
When she walks away at the end of everything he thinks it’s better she doesn’t have one, that she can’t haunt him the way he haunts these streets.
A charm for Karl. A charm for Lizzie. A charm for Michael.
Charms for the lads in the shop and the girls in the office. For Johnny Dogs and all his boys. For anyone that wears blades in their caps and guns on their belts.
His empire, his army, filled with men who can’t die, men who rise from their graves over and over. Men who serve the Shelby name, who’ll defend it to their last breath and then some. Layer upon layer of protection between them and the gun and the knife, so many layers they’ll never have to die again.
He still sleeps with one hand at his neck, the other on his gun. Just in case.
There’s something about London – the air, the people, the wealth – that sets Tommy’s teeth on edge. There’s something about Alfie Solomons too, his shabby clothes, his shuffling gate, his sharp eyes.
“You’re a brave lad, ain’t ya?” Alfie says, mocking, and Tommy nearly laughs: you don’t know the half of it. The curve of his lips makes Alfie sit up, take notice. “And why is that, eh? What’s Tommy Shelby got that makes him so brave?”
“A gun?” Tommy blows smoke towards Alfie, feels a stab of satisfaction when he flaps his hand to waft it away. “A gang?”
Alfie makes a face that might be a smile. “Yeah, yeah,” he’s saying but he’s leaning forward, eyes dragging up and down, searching, searching, until they catch on the glint of gold in the hollow of Tommy’s throat. “Now what you got there, hmm? What’s that lil’ thing on your neck?”
Tommy doesn’t touch it but it’s a close thing – a tiny twitch of his hand, ash shattering across his trousers. Alfie’s eyes go sharper still.
“Looks to me like you got a lucky charm. That right?”
Tommy laughs again, makes it as hard as he can to cover the sudden bite of anxiety. “I don’t believe in luck, Alfie.”
“Mmm. Neither do I. Doesn’t mean I don’t wear –” Alfie fishes inside his shirt, pulls out something silver and shimmering – “This.”
It’s a charm, not so different from his own; a squat figure with arms and legs, letters carved on the front. The sight of it makes bile burn red-hot through Tommy’s chest.
Alfie nods at him knowingly. “We all got out own things. You got your gypsy witchcraft, I got my Jewish magic. Or not magic as such, my rabbi wouldn’t approve of that. But it’s all the same, ennit. All comes from the same place. Does the same thing.”
It’s hard to swallow around the rock in his throat, to force anything out past his shock and his horror and his disbelief.
“And what does it do for you, Alfie?”
Alfie’s smile is small and secretive, a barely-there curl behind his beard. “Pray you don’t ever have to find out, mate. But if I was you, brave little Tommy with his gun and his gang, I’d be careful where I was stepping.” Slowly, slowly, he leans back in his chair, fingers steepled. “Now, how ‘bout lunch?”
Sometimes he gets sloppy. Sometimes they get too close.
Sabini’s men catch him by surprise. He looks at them and their fists and their boots and thinks do it, come on, crack my skull open, bleed me out – you fuckers are going to be surprised when I wake up spitting and screaming and coming for you next.
Then the chain on his neck creaks, groans, snaps, and through the swelling round his eyes he can see it there, a glimmering gold snake against the stone.
And he’d laugh but it hurts to breathe and he can see his blood slicking the cobbles and his heart’s pounding the way it had in France when he slit John’s throat for the first time – no fucking guarantees and if he dies here in his own backyard that’s it, it’s over. It’s all wasted, the hundred deaths he’s died before: bullets, bombs, bayonets, every single one wasted because he was careless enough, reckless enough, stupid enough to court danger.
But death doesn’t come for him this time, just an Irishman with a grudge and a broken heart. Nothing wasted, nothing gained – at least not yet – and he’s grateful, blindly stupidly grateful for this curse of theirs.
When he’s finally safe, cradled by the barge, lulled by water, black powder rubbed into his skin and Curly humming a quiet song on the deck, he runs his fingers over that little charm, kisses the grooves and marks. Prays to whatever god or devil that blesses them to keep him just a little longer: long enough to make this deal, long enough to make his mark.
Later, when he kills a soldier and Sabini’s hissing “Why won’t you gypsies just fucking die” – and even later still, walking away from his grave, another man’s blood on his face – he thinks of his prayers and turns his face into the wind, as cold as the metal against his skin.
Grace comes back to him, pushes her way past every line of defence until there’s nothing he can do but give into her, into them and their future, the ring on her finger and the baby in her belly.
He slides the charm to her again, not across a bar but across their mahogany dining table in their panelled dining room in the huge fucking mansion he bought for her, for them.
She smiles at it, toying with the chain. “I told you I don’t need jewellery, Tommy.”
“You take it, Grace.” His fingers are clumsy as he pushes it into her hand. “You put it on and you never take it off, you hear?”
He can see her bristling – she’s offended, of course, this modern woman of his – but the thought of losing her again makes his body shake, his heart stumble. This is the line he can’t cross. But how to explain it to her, how to make a good god-fearing girl loop the devil around her throat?
“Please,” is all he can say. There’s a tremor in voice to match his hand. “Please, Grace.”
It’s quiet, too quiet, they’re both holding their breath. Outside one of the maid’s clunks past, footsteps heavy on the floorboards.
“I could count the times you’ve said please on one hand,” she says quietly. Her eyes are wide and bright and he’s drowning in them, in her. “Alright, my love, I’ll wear it for you.”
He can’t help smiling, laughing, victorious, and she does too, sweet and soothing, like wind chimes on a vardo, dancing in the wind. He’ll pay any price to keep hearing that sound until the day the devil finally comes for him for good.
Grace dies in his arms, bullet in her heart and charm round her neck.
“It’s okay,” he tells her, “Grace, love, you’ll be alright.”
He can hear the screaming, hear glasses smashing to the floor, hear the stomp of boots as Arthur and John and Finn finish off the fucker that came for him – but he’s only got eyes for her as she stares up at him, breath stuttering, blood pumping out of her. She’s dying, just like John, just like him, but she’s never done it before and she’s terrified, whites of her eyes flashing up at him. There’s no knife in his pocket this time, he can’t make it quick, but he’ll wait with her, he’ll wait and hold her until she burns out, until she reignites.
So he waits. He waits and waits and fucking waits, while the boys are beating the Italian into the ground and Ada’s screaming for an ambulance and Polly’s holding his hand and –
“Tommy.” He can barely hear Polly over the roaring in his ears. “Tommy, she’s gone. She’s not coming back.”
She is, the charm brings them back, that’s how this it works, and he’s looking at her and there’s a bullet in her heart but no charm on her neck, no tiny piece of gold glinting in the hollow of her collarbones.
Just a fucking sapphire, the same colour as his eyes.
It would be easy, he thinks sometimes when it’s late at night and he’s alone in the dark with only his thoughts for company, to take it off. Throw it away. Give it all up. It would be so easy to just lay down and die.
So he takes it off – and the next day the priest cracks his head against cold tile, leaves him with nothing but a gaping wound to match the one inside his chest, the slow steady feeling that he’s splitting in two. He could die from this, he realises, this could be it – and he feels nothing, no regret, no fear, just calm at the clear path opening up for him. One last death.
But if his body wants to lay down, his brain, that swelling, dying thing, it won’t let him. It clings to that memory of a first breath after the darkness, of a first touch after the cold. It won’t let him die yet. Once again, he survives the night.
In the hospital, after surgery, when he’s lying dazed and doped-up, Ada comes to him and slips something into his hand.
“Found it on your dresser,” she says and he has to look away from her heavy, knowing stare. “Don’t you die on us now, Tom. Not after all of this.”
When she leaves he cradles it carefully, cautiously, feels the cold metal that has always, will always weigh him down. What’s better, a charm or a noose? What if they’re the same?
He puts it on, takes it off. Puts it on.