Year In, Year Out

[rix_scaedu]

I wrote this to the Thimbleful Thursday prompt "Year In, Year Out."

Thomas and Manfred liked to come prepared for their little meetings, even though they happened irregularly and with little notice.

Thomas brought a pair of tea thermoses.

Manfred brought coffee for two, with cream and sugar on the side. There was no alcohol because they were driving.

Thomas usually had seed cake in a tin, unless he had shortbread biscuits.

Manfred had strudel, except near Christmas when he had Stollen.

They would sit together, eat, drink and chat whilst inside the building, over the wooded hill or wherever, their employers were probably busily thwarting each other. Those employers, Sir James Sheather and Baron Gunther von Mannheim, fought the secret, unannounced skirmishes of the Unspoken War on behalf of their respective nations and that meant that usually they opposed each other. Occasionally they were allies.

Thomas and Manfred, though, were always friends, not burning their bridges no matter what the current rhetoric said. Their employers’ foibles remained off-limits but they happily dissected the characters of other players War, such as Miss Sarah Dors, the mercenary munitions heiress. In their opinion that trans-Atlantic lady was dangerous and untrustworthy - a view they were confirmed in when she ordered hirelings to dispose of the four of them.

Both revealed as not ‘just’ drivers, Thomas and Manfred began to share old war stories too.