WRITTEN FOR ME ( thomas shelby )

011 ━ The First Stamp Was Special ..

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" The First Stamp Was Special "

          HOPE COMES FROM UNEXPECTED places, in the strangest of ways. Tommy Shelby's hope came in the shape of a letter with a stamp no one recognised on their first glance. It was a letter that got lost amongst many other documents piling up on his desk, now fancier stock than five months ago. The income of the Shelby & Co. Limted has entered a steady climb since the Cheltenham Races passed onto them, and especially since the Alloways Liverpool transport started blossoming into their revenue its true value. Every now and again, Tommy would visit the stable, to remember and to feel a fragment of what he used to feel again; they were a true momenument of investment, stables he built for the twelve purebred horses Jacqueline Alloways' had given him for truly nothing at all. A priceless gift.

He owed a woman he had very little hope of ever seeing again the world; despite his own heart being with her, wherever she was, dead or alive, Tommy was immovable in his belief that he was indebted to her trust, to her generosity, to the purity of the love she granted him regardless of who they were and what they did — a love against all odds.

It was not for the lack of trying that Thomas Shelby had given up on his hope. For two months since the news of Jacqueline and her brothers being incarcerated reached Birmingham, he had pulled every single string he had, called in all the favors that could bring him any edge, even got a handful of his men to the states across the ocean to be his eyes and ears on the foreign land, but nothing. Not about her. Not about her brothers.

"Ladies in prison," Arthur had often been the plaguing downfall of Tommy's hope on the matter, each time he was meant with another dead end, "it ain't a good place to be nowhere in the word. They fuck us up, men, but women are easier to torture, to maim. And fuck, I pray that she's already dead, Tommy. Jackie's feisty, but she's small... I'd rather know her dead then the pupper of some brute. And this thing about no one knowing a thing about where she is being held... it doesn't smell good at all."

The despairing heights that Tommy reached in those months were starting to get awfully visible to everyone, to people that didn't even know him well enough to have access to such personal knowledge too. So slowly, but surely, he started swallowing Arthur's pills like medicine, gulping far too much alcohol than anyone ever should, only so he could accept the loss and move on.

He was a sore loser.

And to forget Jacqueline Alloways, Tommy would have to drink the whole world dry first.

It had been a lukewarm May day spent at his stables that he returned from that late evening. The plans he had after he poured himself a finger of whiskey in a clean glass were to sit down at his desk and finally tackle the mountain of documents that had piled up. About halfway through the pile, naturally, he reached an envelope whose stamp confused him as well. There was something about that confusion, in the dead of night, after three refills of his glass, that pushed his mind to remember everything about Jackie, everything he could — Tommy cursed himself so often since she left that he hadn't married her sooner, that he hadn't stayed with her the whole day or forced her to stay against all odds, but the hardest regret to live with was the one regarding how very little time he spent memorizing the smallest details of her features. Jackie's smile was a radiant ghost, her hair a fire he was scared to seek again in spiced ales, but there was more to her than that and he remembered, he felt, too little to do justice to the details without contour and her Renaissance perfection.

This was his torment after all: to remember her as something permanently out of reach.

And that envelope with an odd stamp that he held, resuscitated her memory in spite of the spirits he had burned at his sobriety with. Such a feat was worth his attention and perhaps even his care, as he cut the envelope open and revealed a letter of two pages length. Tommy couldn't exactly explain what about the stamp on the envelope had startled his heart, his soul and his mind alike into havoc, until he started reading...