Chương 13: Chapter Thirteen: A Good Morning Until It Wasn't

The wild stock from her marsh run was, to put it charitably, not in its best state. The flowers were in poor shape and there were not many of them. A small bunch of violets, bent and ragged from being wet twice over. Three anemones, two of which had lost petals somewhere between the reed beds and Pell Street. A cluster of something she couldn't name… they were orange, improbably vivid, with petals held impossibly open. They had survived better than the rest. Were any of these flowers in season?

Probably not, but the atmosphere outside the cities had changed with magic and now the flora and fauna was too odd to understand or predict properly. The strawberries, which made up the bulk of what she'd actually managed to gather before the Marsh Boggart had interrupted her plans entirely, were not going to sell at a flower pitch. They were also almost entirely crushed. After talking to Mrs. Hatch about the safety of fruits from outside Londinium, Alice had eaten them for breakfast for several days now.

She hadn't prepared much for fruits, after all, she didn't even know properly where to sell them and at what price, but she would learn before her next visit to the marsh. Strawberries aside, Alice had almost left all of her gains at home as presenting the barely-salvaged flowers to a market felt optimistic to the point of embarrassment. She hadn't, though.

She'd wrapped what could be wrapped, set it in the basket alongside the regular cultivated stock she'd bought from the woman with the red apron, and carried everything to the fourth pitch from the baker's corner with her good arm while keeping the splinted one against her body. She had started the day late, but she arranged the wild stock on the left, where the early light caught it better, and set a price, and waited.

What happened was that a woman stopped at the pitch at seven forty-three and looked at the wild anemones for maybe four seconds before buying two of them without even haggling for the price. Then a second woman. Then a man in a good coat who seemed vaguely embarrassed to be buying flowers in the first place, and who bought the orange-improbable ones without looking at the paper at all. By eight-fifteen, the wild stock was gone. Alice stood behind the pitch and did the maths. [Arithmetic] – Passive.

Skill [Arithmetic] has levelled up. She looked at the notification, then at the gap in the pitch where the wild stock had been, then at the coins in her apron pocket. One marsh run had given her a dislocated shoulder, a bite wound, two level-ups, three new skills, and had needed approximately three days of recovery before she could even be somewhat ready for a day of work.

It had also produced enough income in thirty-two minutes to cover a week's rent at number fourteen, all three recovery days of stock costs, and four shillings of margin besides. Alice could see why people did it. And she had only needed to almost-die for it too. Well, part of that was her own recklessness, she supposed.

The woman at the next pitch, whose name Alice still didn't know, and who had corrected her dahlia pricing on her first day without being asked, was watching the empty space where the wild flowers had been. She said nothing. She was quite clearly thinking something.

The cultivated stock sold at its usual pace through the rest of the morning, which required more effort for less result but was income nonetheless. She was working out, slowly and by trial, what moved quickly and what sat. Chrysanthemums were reliable. Tulips sold to men who appeared to have done something wrong. Violets were a common staple. A woman paused at the dahlias, looked at them, looked at the empty section of the pitch.

"Have you got any more of those?" she said.

"The other ones."

"Not today," Alice said.

"I go out for wild stock when I can. I'll have more next week, most likely. These are cultivated in the city, but they're a good bloom." The woman bought two bunches of the cultivated dahlias without further discussion. She thought of using it as advertising when the next customer stopped. It was an older woman in a good shawl who looked at the chrysanthemums carefully, and asked about any others she had to offer.

"I sell wild stock when I have it," Alice said.

"Just sold out this morning. These are cultivated, but they're fresh in from the yard today."

"Wild stock," the woman repeated, seeming both frightened and awed. She bought the chrysanthemums.

"I'll make sure to come next week then." [Advertise] – Passive. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Skill [Advertise] has levelled up. It was a bit funny how the wild flowers sold the cultivated stock simply by existing in the same sentence as it. She sold tulips to the man who'd been standing at the edge of the pitch for too long looking guilty, and watched him leave, somewhat relieved, having not quite solved his problem but believing to have at least done something about it.

Nell arrived at her usual time. She set up the match tray with ease, having done it without thinking for years, and sorted three boxes, and looked at Alice once, briefly, in the way she always did, the kind that took in considerably more than it let on. Then she looked at the pitch. At the gap where the wild flowers had been. She said nothing for the better part of forty minutes. Then, "Those were from outside the gate." Alice was counting change for a woman who'd bought chrysanthemums.

She finished the count, said thank you, watched the woman move on.

"Some of them," she said. Nell looked at the splinted arm.

"I'm fine," Alice said. Nell went back to her matches. As conversations went, this one had been… efficient, she could say? Everything that needed to be there had been, and nothing that didn't was. Alice was always surprised by how little Nell needed but appreciated this more than she would have been able to explain. Her current life was one where she constantly managed what she said and to whom. As usual, the constable passed at ten past the hour. Nodded at the baker. Kept going south.

The weather was typical of Britannian autumn, the kind that found its way through wool and settled into joints, especially the ones that had recently been wrenched in the wrong direction. She ate a hot roll from the baker at half past ten, standing, one-handed, not thinking too hard about the fact that she was eating standing up in a street in 1837 with a bite wound and a splint and a basket of flowers and no particular plan for the next decade beyond survive long enough to figure it out.

It was simple moments like these that made it all seem unreal. Transmigration into this strange world still freaked her out at times. She had also been turning over, in the quieter stretches of the morning, the question of the attribute levels. Vigour and Acuity had both gone up after the marsh run, which was, she noted, after she'd brought both of them to numbers she preferred not to think about too carefully. One point of Vigour.

She didn't know what Acuity had been sitting at by the end of it, but it had not been high. The question was whether this was cause or coincidence: whether the system required you to actually exhaust an attribute before it could expand it, the way a muscle supposedly worked, or whether the timing was arbitrary and she was pattern-matching out of sheer optimism. She had only one example of this, and it was not enough to build a theory on.

Alice was unsure whether she was very much hoping it was cause and not coincidence, however. If it was, that meant she needed to get close to death to level up Vigour and Acuity. If not, if the alternative was true, then she had no clue how to level up her attributes. She held in a sigh, and was on her way to convincing herself that perhaps a second roll was reasonable when Nell spoke again.

"Saw a constable on the Row yesterday morning," she said, without looking up.

"Not ours." Alice waited, thoughts of food gone.

"Different one. Going along the pitches, asking if anyone remembered some rich lady. Said she'd told someone she was coming to this market." Nell sorted a matchbox, put it down.

"Last anyone saw of her, apparently."

"When?"

"Weeks ago." Nell reached into her coat and produced a folded paper, a penny broadsheet, creased from being carried. She set it on the edge of the pitch without comment. Alice looked at it. The headline was not subtle. It never was, with the penny press. THE EAST-END RIPPER – NO ONE IS SAFE Gentlewoman of Clerkenwell Among Feared Victims as Police Leak Sparks Panic She picked it up with her good hand. The article was the kind of journalism that dressed rumour in the clothes of fact.

A police source, unnamed, had suggested that a Miss Ruth Calder, of respectable address in Clerkenwell, missing these past three weeks, was feared to be the latest victim of the same hand responsible for the deaths of several working women in Aldgate and Whitechapel. The connection had not been confirmed. The police had declined to comment.

The press had printed it anyway, along with a description of Miss Calder, a note that she had last been seen heading toward the Aldgate Flower Market, and a full column of breathless speculation about what it meant that the killer, the East-End Ripper, as this paper had taken to calling him, had apparently moved from the working poor to the respectable classes. East-End Ripper, Alice thought, from a very quiet place at the back of her mind. Could it be? She tucked that thought away immediately and looked at Nell.

"You'd seen her?" Alice said.

"Maybe." Nell's expression didn't change.

"Woman came by the pitch a few weeks back. Nice coat. Bought plenty of flowers. Asked about special orders." She paused.

"I didn't think about it until the constable came." Alice looked back at the paper. Ruth Calder. Three weeks missing. Last seen at this market. She folded the paper carefully along its existing crease. The six names from the cloth bag under the third floorboard were not something she thought about often. She didn't think she had the power or the means or the standing to think about lists of any kind. She thought about it now.

She went through the names as she had memorised them that first night at the lodging house: Ellen Marsh. Agnes Dowd. Harriet Fenn. Frances Cole. Eleanor Mercer. And Ruth Calder. She set the paper on the edge of the pitch.

"Thank you," she said. Nell looked at her for one moment with her usual careful attention, and then went back to her matches.