Chương 16: Chapter Sixteen: The Third Testament and Other Revelations

Three days after Rowe's visit, Alice had more or less worked out what she thought. It had been constantly in her mind, even at the pitch, between customers, while her hands went through the motions of arranging flowers that didn't need arranging. The working theory, which she had gone back and forth on multiple times, was that the list of women was a special group of victims.

Most serial killers had a type and preferred geography, yes, but the fact of the matter was that Alice had a sixth name on her list, who the police did not know about, meaning she was likely still alive. When taking the Inspector at face value, instead of treating this whole thing as some plot to trap her, which she had unfortunately been convinced of for at least a few hours, the only conclusion was that these weren't opportunistic murders, so much as planned assassinations. Although the targets were strange.

Which still left the question of what, exactly, the original Alice had been. She had two ideas on that so far, and couldn't decide on which was best… or worst. Theory one: an accomplice who'd become a liability. Killers who worked with partners turned on them eventually. The money, the knife, the chair wedged under the door in August, the fact that she'd stopped going to Whitmore Lane entirely, all of that fit. Except for the list. You didn't write down the names of women you'd helped select for someone to kill.

You especially didn't write down the days and times. That was evidence, and people who knowingly participated in murders did not, as a rule, document it. Unless they were absolute idiots, of course. The only reason that Alice could think of that would justify holding onto the list and the rest of the items in this case, was that the former Alice was about to turn in her partner to the police and claim some sort of deal, be that shortened sentence or immunity, as a result.

It could explain why the partner turned on her, but she wasn't fond of this theory, for obvious reasons. Theory two, then: the original Alice had been watching the killer. Tracking his pattern. The list had names and times, which resembled what attempts at surveillance looked like when working alone, and without resources. The don't come twice note was a warning to herself, not a record.

She'd found something at Whitmore Lane, somehow, and she'd been careful about it, and then at some point in August she'd been not careful enough. That, Alice thought, was the more frightening theory. It implied the original Alice had known what she was looking at. Though why a flower girl would ever involve herself in something like this, before the press or the public even knew about it was anyone's guess. Not that the killer needed to know why to silence a potential witness permanently.

Regardless, she was not going to resolve any of this from a flower pitch, and she knew it. Whitmore Lane was the obvious next step and she was not going to Whitmore Lane, not yet, possibly not for some time, because she was still terribly weak, and Rowe had already noticed something about her, which meant he was watching, and walking directly to the location where the victims had all had connections before dying would be catastrophic.

She had, on Wednesday afternoon during a slow hour, briefly considered leaving the city altogether. Getting on a coach. Becoming someone new, somewhere else, from the beginning. She'd given this a good hour of daydreaming before the problems became obvious: no connections to speak of, no preparation done, and nothing said guilty more clearly to an investigating Inspector than the person he'd just spoken to vanishing into the north. She'd put it in the back of her mind under last resort and left it there. So.

She was staying. She was going to the pitch every day. She was reading her books. She was watching the penny papers for Ripper coverage and she was going to resume wild gathering in a few days, during daylight hours. Northeast gate, the first section only, nothing ambitious. Carefully, boringly, and with very little unforeseen excitement, hopefully, she was going to learn as much as she could about this world before she did anything about any of the rest of it. This was the plan.

She was, at best, at peace with this plan, before a better one came along.

Later that day, when Alice was in her room and alone, she spread the books from the library across the bed in order of relevance, and set the Queen Anne's Bible aside for last on the grounds that it was the longest and densest and she needed context before she could read it properly. She started with recent Britannian religious history, mostly due to personal curiosity. It was thin and written in a brisk and matter-of-fact.

The Reformate Church of Britannia, it explained, had been established as a formal institution in the decades following the Angel's Arrival of 1777, reconstituting the prior Protestant structures of the nation around the gifts of the Angel's Voice as theological confirmation rather than theological question. God, and His Will, existed. The Church had always said as much, had it not? The Arrival had simply provided undeniable evidence.

The Catholic Church, for its part, had arrived at the same conclusion by a different route and at considerable speed, and the resulting scramble between Rome and London, or rather, between Nova Roma and Londinium, to produce the definitive theological account of what had just happened to every living person on earth had been, by the tone of this particular slim history, extremely competitive.

The Queen Anne's Bible, she read, was not, as she had initially assumed, a straightforward English translation of new standard scriptures. It was a translation of the Third Testament. She stopped and read that again, wide-eyed. The Third Testament. Written by a council of Catholic scholars between 1777 and 1785. Eight years of Sardinian (was that what Italy or the Vatican was called here?) theologians attempting to explain, in canonical terms, what the Angel's Arrival meant and what the gifts were and where they fit within the existing structure of Christian doctrine. Not a prophecy. A response.

Controversial in the sense that everything Nova Roma produced was automatically controversial to Protestant Europe, but adopted by most of it within a generation regardless, because the alternative was leaving the theological monopoly on the Angel's gifts entirely to the Catholics, and nobody Protestant was willing to do that. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. Queen Anne had been on the throne of Britannia when the Arrival came.

She had commissioned a panel of Reformate scholars to produce a British translation and adaptation of the Third Testament, a process taking eleven years, completed by her daughter Caroline after Anne's death, and the resulting text had become the foundational scripture of the Reformate Church of Britannia. Not the King James Bible. Not the standard translations she knew.

A Third Testament, translated for a country she had never heard of, under a queen who in her world had been Princess Royal, Princess of Orange, Regent of the Netherlands, and dead by 1759 without the throne of Britannia ever coming near her. Here, apparently, Anne had been born a generation later. And had become queen. Alice set the book on her knee and looked at the wall for a moment. She wasn't sure she had fully processed half the words she had just read.

She read through the succession line, because she had a strange suspicion now. Queen Anne, regnant. Her daughter, Queen Caroline, who had completed the Bible translation. Then a King William. Then the current monarch: King George. His heir was a Princess Elizabeth, noted in the text as Crown Princess, seventeen years old as of the last edition. There was a Victoria mentioned in passing, in a footnote about the broader royal family. A cousin of no particular significance. Alice sat with this for a moment.

In her world, 1837 was the year Queen Victoria ascended the throne. The start of the Victorian era. The pivot point around which a century of art, politics, literature, empire, and social transformation had turned. Here, Victoria was a footnote. She was in the Georgian era. So, everything she knew about this world's Britain, her own country, was wrong. She hadn't even known what time period she was in. How fantastic. She accepted this, set the religious history aside, and picked up the Queen Anne's Bible.

The front matter was extensive. Translator's preface, editorial notes, a lengthy justification of the council's methodology. She skimmed through to the Third Testament itself and found the opening passage, which read: In the season of the Messenger's coming, the Voice fell upon all peoples as rain falleth upon the earth: unto each according to the nature of their being, and unto none more than the measure of their readiness.

For these gifts are not bestowed as a man throweth a coin unto the poor, but as light giveth sight unto the eye that is already formed to receive it. Know therefore that the gifts of the Messenger are not wonders wrought from without the order of creation, but the hidden works of that order made manifest, laid up in all things from the first moment of making, and brought forth now at the Messenger's appointed word. Seek not to refuse them as ungodly, for they are of God's own fashioning.

Seek not to worship them as God himself, for they are of God's own giving. They are the instruments of the world's appointed labour, and the world's appointed labour is not yet finished. Was this what it felt like to experience derealization? The language was right, just as the cadence, the parallelism, the concrete imagery. It read like scripture. What it was saying, however, was… inane.

The theology had been constructed very carefully to be impossible to disprove, because it had incorporated the System into itself not as an exception to the natural order but as an expression of it. A bubble of hilarity burst through her chest. She could not believe she would have to read the sequel to the New Testament to learn about game mechanics. Game mechanics! In the freaking Bible! She was an atheist and still felt that this was sacrilegious! She found the footnote on the Messenger.

The Reformate Church of Britannia, it noted, held that the Messenger was one of the seven archangels, most probably Gabriel, Archangel of Divine Communication. The Catholic Church held the same position. Neither institution had formally declared it, however. The original council of scholars had declined to specify, on the grounds that the Messenger's name was not given in the Third Testament text and it was not their place to exceed the text.

The Catholic Church, Alice thought, with a kind of dazed appreciation, responded to the most significant theological event in human history by producing a new book of scripture in a mere handful of years, convinced the Protestants to adopt it within a generation, and then, even after all of that, still wouldn't commit to which archangel it was. She really did admire the restraint. The part that got her most was the Reformate Church's response to all of this.

Half a millennium of schism, and what had resolved it was not dialogue or compromise or any act of human reconciliation. No… It was both sides adopting the same attitude to one event and continuing to argue about everything else. The Reformate Church of Britannia and the Catholic Church were still two distinct institutions with separate clergy, separate hierarchies, and presumably separate opinions about every other theological question ever posed.

They had simply both looked at the Third Testament, looked at the Angel's Arrival, looked at each other, and agreed that this particular document was not one they could afford to leave to the other side. She set the Bible on the windowsill next to the dried chrysanthemum and picked up the geography volume. She needed a breather. The map was on the third page. Alice looked at it for a long moment. Then she looked at it again, more carefully, in case she had misread it the first time. She had not misread it.

She knew European geography. She had studied it, lived in it, sat in European airports running out of things to read and memorised railway maps for no reason except mild anxiety and a need to feel oriented. The shape of the continent was as familiar to her as her own handwriting. This map… was not familiar. Where France should have been, there was a so-called Francian Empire, considerably larger, pushing east into what should have been northern Italy and south into the northeastern corner of the Iberian Peninsula.

The rest of the peninsula, everything west and south of that, was labelled Castile. Portugal did not appear on the map at all. Where the rest of Italy should have been: The Kingdom of Sardinia, occupying the peninsula south of the imperial border, with a small annotation indicating Turin as its capital. The Balkans had four named states where she had expected only Ottoman territory. She barely recognized two of them. The Baltic coast showed a single political entity labelled The Hanseatic Union.

To the East, where Russia should have sat, was Ruthenia, present and enormous, as Russia tended to be, though its western border was considerably further east than she knew. She looked at the map for another full minute. I've been here for a month now, she thought, and I didn't know what era I was in, what the continent looked like, or that Portugal did not exist. She was going to need significantly more books.