Chương 14: Chapter Fourteen: Shakespeare Exists, Which Is Something

Mrs. Hatch had asked, the previous evening, whether Alice would accompany her to the Sunday service at St. Clement's. She was careful about it as if she understood that Alice might refuse, but wished to ask anyway.

"I'd like to say a prayer for your recovery," she'd said, with a glance at the splinted arm.

"If that's all right with you." Alice had said it was more than all right. She meant it. She had been curious since her arrival here about what a church service looked like in a world where the System, or the Angel's Voice, as she had heard it called, was publicly integrated into the functions of Britannian civic life. Magic existed. The church knew it existed. The question that had been sitting at the back of her attention was how they had managed to explain that in accordance with traditional Christian doctrine.

St. Clement's was dark red brick on the outside, sooty from the coal smoke that had been settling into its mortar since it was built, with a spire that drove itself into the Londinium skyline at an angle that seemed more aggressive than devotional. Inside was another matter entirely.

The nave opened upward into exposed timber beams and scissor trusses that drew the eye toward a ceiling painted in deep ochre and blue, the ribs of the vaulting picked out in red, and what light came through the stained glass panels on the southern wall turned the worn floor tiles into something almost luminous. The working-class parishes of Londinium gave their people, Alice was beginning to understand, the most colour they were likely to see all week. Mrs.

Hatch took their seats near the back, which were free and unappropriated, while the rented pews toward the front filled with coats of a better cut, and the painted walls glowed in the candlelight. Alice sat very still and thought: whoever built this knew exactly what they were doing. The service began. The priests opened with a chant, formal and low, call-and-response between the three of them at the front.

She had enough Latin from school to follow the shape of it, not the meaning, not reliably, her schoolgirl Latin had been largely sacrificed to the study of human psychology, but enough to recognise when the grammar changed. Liturgical Latin had a quality to it, long cadences, clauses that curved and resolved, the kind of language built for sustained breath and hymns. What kept stopping her ear were the single words.

Dropped into the flow of the prayer at irregular intervals, never in the same position twice, standing alone in a way that Latin nouns and verbs simply did not when they were part of a sentence. Imperatives, she thought. Or bare nouns used as commands. Observa. Protege. Custodi. Observe. Protect. Guard. She caught a fourth one she didn't have the vocabulary for as well. Skill created: [Latin Language] Skill [Latin Language] has leveled up.

The System recognized she had started pulling meaning from a language she'd only half-known in a previous life. Regardless, this was not the time. Alice kept her face still and her eyes on the altar. The priests were using active skills as part of the liturgy. The Latin was both the delivery and the disguise. It seemed that the church had spent the past few decades building a ceremony and formal register around the system's requirements and methods.

Additionally, it was good to know that 'the Angel' did not care whether the skill came in English or Latin or any other language. It only cared about the intent and the utterance, which the church had turned into sacrament. [Observe] – Passive.

Skill [Observe] has leveled up. This was her most used skill. If it didn't level up at this point, she'd weep. Alice looked at the senior priest at the altar and watched his hands as he raised them. Watched the slight change in the air directly above the congregation. Watched two dozen people close their eyes at exactly the same moment, not from instruction, but because the passive skill that had just fired had reached them all at once. Even she felt her eyes instinctively close as warmth enveloped her.

This wasn't the effect of [Observe], so maybe [Protect] or [Guard]? Amusingly, seeing the congregation use and receive the System's skills this way, together, with the church's full support, truly made her wonder how religion had developed to this point in this strange alternate Great Britain. [Notice Detail] – Passive. A priest she hadn't noticed moved down the far aisle in slow procession. He was older than the other clergy and walked with a certain unhurried authority.

Despite his more modest garb, he seemed like someone who had occupied a high-level position for long enough that the role had eaten into his habits and posture. Alice watched him. He was two-thirds of the way to the back of the nave when he turned his head toward her pew. He looked straight at her. It wasn't the brief glance of someone registering a new face. A moment longer, she held his gaze. He frowned, and she smiled gently and looked away unhurriedly, trying to appear like a devoted and kind young woman.

[Feign Ignorance] – Passive. Then he kept walking, and the chant filled the space again, and Mrs. Hatch beside her was mouthing the response fluently as if she had been saying these words for thirty years. She probably had. Alice looked at her hands in her lap and breathed. Skill [Notice Detail] has leveled up.

Skill [Feign Ignorance] has leveled up. She tried hard not to show anything on her face. She hadn't been using [Feign Ignorance] that much, so why did it suddenly level up after just one gaze from that priest? Was it because he was more important or powerful? Did succeeding in using a social skill against someone much higher than you, make leveling up easier, just like in combat? She dwelt on those thoughts and the identity of that man for the rest of the service. This book's true home is on another platform.

Check it out there for the real experience. At the end, Mrs. Hatch pressed a coin into Alice's hand for the collection. She had anticipated Alice might not have thought to bring her own, clever woman. Then she guided her with quiet purpose toward the younger of the three priests, who was accepting thanks and prayers from the departing congregation near the side door.

"Father," said Mrs. Hatch.

"If you would. Miss Darling here was bitten by a stray dog, last week. Her arm is healing but we'd be grateful for a blessing on it." That was the story Alice had decided to share with Mrs. Hatch or anyone else who asked. The priest looked at Alice's splinted arm with appropriate sympathy and told her to hold it out. He spoke kindly, and with ease, appearing to have done this often. He touched her hand briefly, and she paid close attention as he whispered, " Sana Minor."

She felt the words more than heard them, a brief warmth that ran from her wrist to her elbow, distinct from the ordinary warmth of being indoors. The priest had just said a skill name. And Alice recognized it completely! It meant [Lesser Heal] or [Minor Heal], something to that effect. Skill [Observe] has leveled up. She needed to find a Latin dictionary at some point. She had a feeling she would need to pick up the language properly.

"Thank you," she said, when he finished and she meant it. The warmth had settled into something that wasn't very dramatic but it was real and had done something she could feel in the treated bone. She suspected she had greater range of motion now and her injuries would fully heal a couple of days faster than initially expected. She really, really wanted this skill. She would have to test ways to recreate it in private. Something to think about.

Mrs. Hatch turned for home. Alice walked with her as far as the chandler's corner and said she had an errand she'd been meaning to run. Mrs. Hatch said she'd keep lunch warm, and went on ahead, and Alice turned north toward Greeley Street. There was a library there that stayed open on Sundays. Alice had been thinking about this for a while now.

She had made a note to check the library for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, knowing it was written in the nineteenth century but not the exact year, but had been too busy with other things during this time. Mostly with not almost dying. She was not almost dying today. The librarian was perhaps forty, with wire spectacles and appeared entirely at home in his occupation. He looked up when she entered and waited.

"Good morning, sir. I'm looking for a book," Alice said." Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The author is Lewis Carroll." He appeared confused for a moment, then searched his catalogue.

"I'm afraid I don't know the title," he said after looking up.

"Or the author. Is it recent?"

"Possibly. If you don't have it, that's fine." She paused, and decided to follow her hunch.

"Could you tell me, do you have Frankenstein by Mary Shelley?" He looked up more sharply this time.

"I don't know that work," he said.

"Mary Shelley, you said?"

"Yes. It would have been published around 1818. I heard a stage adaption was quite successful recently." She had written a paper on Shelley at university, so she was quite sure of the date for this one. He shook his head, and he began to look both uncomfortable and irritable. Alice could understand the annoyance of a librarian realizing he was missing books.

"I'm not familiar with any of that, I'm afraid." She kept her expression pleasant.

"What about Pride and Prejudice by an anonymous author?" That was published around the same time as Frankenstein, give or take a few years, if she remembered correctly.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"I don't know that name either." She stood at the desk for a moment. Three separate books and three different authors. They were works that had been famous enough in her world that a librarian in 1837 London should have known at least one of them. Mary Shelley in particular, not just the novel but the outrage of it, the stage plays, the special cultural spectacle of a woman, and not a man, producing something so troubling and so brilliant. That should have left marks. That should have been here.

"Could you show me," she said, keeping her voice entirely level, "where you keep Shakespeare?" He directed her to the far wall. An entire shelf, three rows deep, several editions. William Shakespeare. He still existed then. She looked at the spines for a moment. Shakespeare lived in the 16th century. Mary Shelley and Jane Austen in the late 18th, early 19th. Lewis Carroll, she didn't quite remember if it was early or late 19th century, but she'd keep an eye out in the future. But overall, this was troubling news.

She did not know what this meant yet, but she knew it meant something. She spent the next twenty minutes moving through the shelves with purpose, pulling books by subject and checking publication dates and authors' names against what she carried in her memory. History. Then geography, because her skills included [Britannian Language], [Francian Language], [Prusijan Language], and she had been wanting to understand what Prusija was and where it sat on a map.

Then religion, because the church she had just left was not the Anglican Church of England and had never claimed to be, apparently, and she wanted to know how the hell that happened. She skimmed through the books as she collected them. The history books gave her fragments, dates that were almost familiar, wars that had resolved differently, a map of Europe in which France had a different name and the borders of eastern territories did not match anything she had studied.

The geography confirmed [Prusijan] was a language. Prusija occupied the territory she would have called Germany once. Maybe some variation of the name Prussia? The Francian name was even more bizarre, especially since she couldn't find any mention of an equivalent to the French Revolution. Alice pursed her lips in displeasure. All her former knowledge was for nothing. This world made no sense at all and she'd need to learn everything from scratch.

She was skimming through a slim history of the Church of Britannia when she found it. It was on the reference shelf. Thick, leather-bound, the spine gold-stamped with an elaborate crest. She almost put it back when the title registered. The Queen Anne's Bible. She stood very still for a moment. In her world there was one canonical English Protestant Bible. The King James Bible, commissioned and published in the 17th century, translated by many scholars under the authority of King James I.

She had read from it in three separate funerals and could quote the Twenty-Third Psalm from memory. There was no King James' Bible here. There was a Queen Anne's Bible. Which meant that at some point in the recent history of this world, recent in the sense of the last few centuries, a Queen Anne had held enough authority over the Church of Britannia to commission and canonise a new translation. Which meant that the monarch at the relevant time had been a woman.

Which meant that the line of succession, somewhere in the past couple of centuries, had gone differently. Which meant that practically everything was different. She stood at the reference shelf for a long moment, the Queen Anne's Bible in both hands, and looked at the cover. She had been hoping that in this strange version of Britain, the changes were primarily aesthetic in nature, relative to her former world. As in, from London to Londinium. Not the whole history of Anglican Christianity.

She carried the Bible to the librarian's desk along with the several history books, the geography volume, and the slim religious history, and asked what she owed. It was the most she had spent on anything since arriving in Londinium, more than a week's rent at number fourteen. She paid it without visible hesitation because she was going to read every page of all those books and they were going to be worth considerably more than the cost.

She walked out into the grey autumnal afternoon with her heaviest bag yet and turned for home. Alice made her way inside the lodging house, not long after, and found Inspector Rowe waiting in Mrs. Hatch's front parlour. He stood up when she came in.

"Miss Darling," Rowe said.

"I hope I'm not intruding on your Sunday." She did not swear and tried hard to maintain a pleasant demeanor.

"Not at all, Inspector."