Chương 35: Chapter Thirty-Five: An Unprepared Welcome

Alice took a long moment, before she made herself set it down under a pillow and then went to open the door. Nell stood in the hallway with her shawl pulled tight and a tense expression.

"There you are," she said, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders all at once, which told Alice how genuinely worried she'd been. Her dark hair was scraped back under a worn kerchief, a few loose strands stuck to her forehead from the cold; she had just returned directly from work.

"You didn't come by the pitch today. I… was worried. I asked the baker if he'd seen you, and he hadn't, and you always visit him before going out of the city and I…" she paused, for a moment. Nell didn't usually speak that much or that quickly in one turn.

"I stood there thinking of every terrible reason a girl doesn't show up where she is expected."

"I'm sorry. I should have sent word." Alice stepped back to let her in, glancing once down the empty hallway before shutting the door behind them both. Nell studied her for what seemed to Alice like a long while, but was probably mere seconds. Her sharp, quick eyes were usually color of weak tea but they seemed even lighter under the candlelight.

"You look… You've had that look on you before," she said in the end. Nell had yet to move from just inside the doorway, arms crossed.

"Nervous. Jumpy at nothing, flinching at doors. And then gone, no word, not a note, nothing. And I'm standing there on the corner thinking, well, there she goes, same as last time." Her gaze fell to the floor then, "Same as the others." She didn't flinch, but something tightened at the corner of her mouth as she spoke.

"You didn't go back to Whitmore Lane, did you? Tell me straight." Ah, Alice realized. The original tenant of her body had done much the same as her, suddenly making different choices before she… before she died.

"No," Alice said firmly enough that she hoped it would end the question there. At the same time, a niggling voice in her head questioned, why not? Why hadn't she investigated Whitmore Lane yet?

"I've been here, at home," she said.

"All day, and most of yesterday besides."

"All day," Nell repeated plainly. Her eyes went over everything properly then… the room, the untouched basket still sitting by the door, how only one dying candle was lit despite how far the light had already gone.

"You're not usually one for staying in. I've known you for a long time now, I don't think I've seen you idle a single afternoon, let alone two." Alice held very still for a moment. This was, she recognized with sudden clarity, one of those small turning-points in a person's life that did not announce themselves as one. Nell stood in her room with genuine fear still not quite drained from her face, having come here on the assumption that something terrible had happened to her. That was not something small.

That was genuine worry and care. That was a woman choosing to step closer rather than further away, and Alice had spent two months meeting exactly that kind of gesture with careful, deliberate distance, deeming it too dangerous to simply accept. Trust was earned, never assumed, yes, but was distrust held in reserve until proven wrong really the right choice? To her displeasure, she thought of the nightmare from that morning.

In a past life, she had died alone on an empty street, unable to fulfill any of her last wishes. Not the comfort, not the travel… not the call with whom might have been once her friend. It wasn't death she feared. She'd already worked that out, sitting there, shaking in the grey light. What had surfaced instead, sharp and entirely unexpected, after careful rumination was a series of regrets. Not the big ones, no. Not the things that she could have achieved in a decade or two but that her illness took away.

It was the small ones. The ones she kept putting off, certain there would always be another week for it, right up until there wasn't. She had died never seeing Lisbon. She had died with that call still unmade. And she had spent this entire new life since then keeping people at exactly the same distance that had cost her what might have been some semblance of happiness in the last one. Stolen story; please report. Alice clenched her hands and met Nell's gaze.

"No," Alice agreed, softly, honestly, letting some of her fear show more clearly.

"I'm not, usually." And then, because just that moment had somehow felt like too much, she busied her hands with preparing the fire instead of answering the question Nell hadn't quite asked yet. She'd let it go out sometime that afternoon without noticing, hadn't so much as looked at the small grate all day, too caught up in everything else, and the room had gone fully cold around her without her noticing. Her hands felt it too, they seemed to be freezing.

Alice knelt and coaxed the small heap of coal back to life with more fuss than it usually needed, glad of an excuse to keep her back turned a moment longer, feeding it kindling until the first proper flame caught and held. It wasn't a kitchen, not by any measure, nothing so grand as that, not in a lodging house like Mrs. Hatch's, where the real cooking happened downstairs on the landlady's own range and every tenant made do with whatever heat they could keep in their own four walls.

But a small grate of one's own was common enough even in the cheapest lodgings, and most girls on Pell Street kept a kettle for exactly this purpose, set on its hook once the fire caught, so that tea didn't mean a trip downstairs and an explanation of who was visiting and why. She hung hers now, filled from the jug on the washstand, and only once it was settled properly over the growing flame did she straighten and turn back around.

"Sit, if you like. I'm sorry, it's not much to look at, I know," she said. She had never felt ashamed of her poverty, but hospitality was often determined by preparation, not means, and she certainly had not prepared the room for a guest.

"I never seem to be here long enough to make it look like anyone lives in it properly."

"I've seen worse," Nell said, which was probably true, and settled into the single chair without further comment while Alice took the edge of the bed, the kettle beginning its slow climb toward a whistle neither of them was in any hurry to interrupt with conversation. The tea was ready before either of them said much else, and Alice busied herself pouring.

"Cold's coming on early this year," Nell said, accepting her cup, wrapping both hands around it. Alice had learned that during some tough winters in her childhood that people did that usually when the warmth mattered more than the tea itself.

"My knuckles have known it a fortnight already. Never used to ache like that before twenty." Her hands were chapped from long hours of work regardless of weather, and one thumb was permanently stained faintly yellow with phosphorus. Alice gladly took that change in topic for the reprieve it was.

It seemed, for a moment, remarkably easy to let herself sink into the ordinariness of it all: small talk, weather, the common aches of a body getting older as if by decades in this coal-polluted city, especially after a day as overwhelming and uncomfortably introspective as the one she'd had. Honesty meant continuing with that discomfort, and with it being an impulsive decision, even if only of the private, unspoken kind, she would need to think about how much honesty was appropriate.

She wasn't about to confess to her transmigration, for example, but maybe… maybe at least her emotions? Her fears? It was a relief, genuine and slightly embarrassing, to talk about nothing at all for a moment longer. She used to hate this kind of thing, and now she hid behind it, Alice wryly thought.

"Mine haven't started yet, not like that," Alice said.

"Give it a few more years, I expect, and I'll have earned the right to commiserate properly." Nell huffed something that might have been a laugh.

"Small mercies." She took a sip, made a face at the heat of it, and set it down to cool.

"You hear about the business two doors down? Mrs. Calloway's hen got loose into the Fentons' wash, and there was such a to-do over it you'd have thought the bird had run off with the family silver. Half the street out shouting by the time I left this morning."

"I hadn't heard." Alice found herself smiling despite everything sitting underneath the conversation, grateful Nell was making the effort to keep her on comfortable grounds.

"How did it go?"

"The hen won, far as I could tell. Last I saw it was up on the Fentons' fence looking extremely pleased with itself." Nell shook her head.

"And matches gone up again, another farthing on the gross, if you can believe it. Man at the wholesaler says it's the tin, but I don't see how tin's got anything to do with the price of a matchstick, myself."

"The tin always makes prices go up, if you ask a wholesaler." Alice cradled her own cup, letting the warmth of it settle into hands that had, for the first time all day, mostly stopped their trembling.

"Or the coal. Or the weather. There's always a reason, it's never simply that someone wants more money."

"There's a cynical way of putting it," Nell said.

"I've been often told I have a cynical turn of mind," Alice said.

"It suits you," Nell continued, not unkindly. Her tone was heavy though, not as airy or distracted as during the rest of the small talk. Alice met her gaze. The fire made Nell's eyes look bright as its very own flames.

"Does it?" she asked, not sure why she even did.

"It does," Nell replied, and that strange vulnerability caught up with her once again. Alice set her cup down carefully. Neither of them said anything else for a moment. The fire cracked once, softly, and the silence held.