Chương 5: Chapter Five: In Which She Becomes Alice and Also Finds a Knife

When she finally left, Hyde gave her his card and his second-best coat. He walked her to the door and down the front step of the surgery and into Crane Street, and watched the bustle of a working morning, wheels on cobblestone, someone shouting about money three streets over, a woman arguing at volume with a market cart. She stood on the step with the card in one hand and the coat held at the collar with the other, and thought: right. This is the world I live in now. Hyde gently touched her shoulder.

He seemed to be holding something back on their way to the door, considering the many attempts to start a conversation and then ending up not saying anything, which seemed to make him mildly irritated at himself.

"The coat's a loan," he said in the end, which was probably not true.

"Pell Street's east of Aldgate. Anyone will point you." A pause that ran a beat too long.

"Thursday. I'll know if you don't come." Was he trying to be humorous?

"You are the only doctor here," she pointed out, pulling the coat closer to herself. It was three sizes too large, but she was terribly grateful for it.

"And I am your only patient."

"I have other patients," he said with almost a laugh, there and gone. She had not been as cheeky or forward with her speech during her entire time there.

"Thursday, Miss Darling." It was not quite a question and not quite a command, and she had spent four days in the man's surgery learning that this was his natural register: polite but expecting to be obeyed. It would have irritated her in a colleague. In the man who had sewn her up twice and provided her with tea and moderately interesting novels, she found she didn't particularly mind.

"Alright," she agreed.

"Have a good day, doctor." He watched from the step as she started down Crane Street. The city was already at full volume. A coal cart going one way and a hand barrow the other were conducting a slow, shouted negotiation in the middle of the road that neither appeared to be winning. A woman in a red shawl moved quickly through the crowd, decidedly not acknowledging anything that didn't directly block her.

Coal smoke had settled somewhere below the roofline, turning the morning a peculiar shade of grey that alarmed no one but her. Everything smelled of horses and cold stone and someone's breakfast. She didn't know where Pell Street was.

An amnesiac wouldn't, which was the whole reason for the lie to begin with: she could ask, and asking would be correct behaviour for someone still piecing herself back together, and it would also tell her what she needed to know about the city's geography without anyone finding it strange or curious. She stopped a woman coming the other way with a basket.

"Excuse me. I'm so sorry… I'm looking for Pell Street. I know it's not far, but I'm not sure…" The woman took in the bandages and the too-large coat, and her pallor, and quickly decided she was to be pitied.

"Down to the end. Left at the chandler's. Second right, you'll see the church before you see the street."

"Thank you. Very much." The woman was already moving. Cora already missed her phone and the invention of GPS. She followed the route, which gave her Crane Street's full length, the chandler's position, the lean of a lamp post at the second junction, and the queue outside the corner coffee shop already spilling to the pavement. [Map Building] – Passive. She had hoped this would happen. Useful skill. She kept walking. Two streets on, she felt the… thing. Not saw, but felt, the way you feel glaring eyes watching you.

A wrongness at the edge of her attention, slightly off-register with everything else. She didn't look directly. She used the dark glass of a passing carriage window and found it: Person-shaped, roughly, which was horrifying in itself. This thing was many times the size of what she had fought and she would not survive a fight with this one. It stood in the alley near a cutler's shop thirty feet down, and seemed to be keeping pace without appearing to move. So this monster was here for her.

It didn't just attack people at random as she had hoped. Was it because of the Anathema condition? But how was it out in the day? Were these things not afraid of light? Yes, the alley was somewhat dark and in the shade but– She almost lost track of it for a moment distracted by her thoughts. Cora could have slapped herself. Right. Immediate problem. She did not run. That might make it act out. She took a deep breath and started counting windows. Three, five, seven…

There was a cartway between the cutler's and the apothecary, too narrow for a cart but wide enough for a person. She walked through it. Walked another twenty feet after that. Turned smoothly into the courtyard of a coaching inn, crossed it, and came out through the serving entrance into the next street over, which brought her onto Greybell Lane from the south, facing a church just as the woman from before had described. She looked quickly behind her and at all reflective surfaces.

It looked like the creature was gone. For now. She would have to think of a way to deal with those aberrations soon.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. Number 14 Pell Street had swept steps. Which was rather nice considering the street itself looked to be in severe disrepair. The building she was looking for had three floors of brick, and the stone around the door frame was worn smooth at shoulder height. Alice Darling lives here, Cora thought, somewhat intimidated. I live here. She knocked, because she didn't have a key. Mrs. Hatch opened the door.

That was the owner of the place, she had been told. Or hoped. Why would she have a dangle of keys at her waist otherwise? She was perhaps fifty, with worry lines over her brow and a face that managed to be both welcoming and stern. She looked at Cora with some amount of relief, worry and… was this woman about to scold her?

"Miss Darling," she said.

"Come in, come in. The constable sent word. You poor dear, are you all right? Of course you're not all right. Come in." Alice came in.

"Thank you. I'm so sorry for all the trouble."

"There's no trouble," said Mrs. Hatch. She was already moving toward the stairs.

"Your room's been kept as you left it. I told William and Mrs. Peel to give you peace and quiet. There may be soup later."

"That's very kind."

"It's just soup," Mrs. Hatch said, with briskness, as if she found the thanks given offensive. She paused at the foot of the stairs.

"I opened the windows for some fresh air. Third floor. You know where it is." She did not know where it was, but staircases generally went up. The third floor had three doors; one of them was slightly ajar and looked recently attended to. She pushed it open. It was small and it had one window, open, letting in some much needed light. There was a bed with a wool blanket and a chest beside it; a washstand with a cracked basin positioned to conceal the crack, which was a thoughtful arrangement.

A hook behind the door with dark linen clothes hanging. On the windowsill, there was a box that held a dried chrysanthemum. She checked the chest first. Inside, more spare clothes, mostly dresses, folded with care. A comb. A pair of boots with a small stitched repair on the right heel, worn but cleaner than the ones on her feet. And a tin. The kind that had once held tobacco or tea and had since been put to more pressing use. She opened it. Nine shillings and four pence. She counted it twice without meaning to.

That was a good amount of money saved for this time. She couldn't help but let out a breath of relief. She could survive for a few days until she got her bearings at least. She put the tin back in place and looked at the floor. It felt like the kind of room that had a loose board. The real Alice had [Maintain Alias] and [Vault] at some level on her screen, which were not skills you developed selling flowers.

You got them from practice, and practice meant prior planning, and prior planning meant somewhere you had decided to plan toward. She walked around, knocking on several boards, trying to find one that would sound different. There. Third board from the left wall, under the bed. She pressed it with two fingers, and it gave. She lay flat on the floor and reached in. A cloth bag, knotted at the top. She opened it and… immediately started thinking about how screwed she was with this identity.

There was a small bag with two pounds and fourteen shillings. At the rough arithmetic of a flower girl's wage, that was three to four months of honest income. Not something that anyone in the lower classes could save in this era, not with honest work. The tin had held the accessible money, nine shillings that anyone searching the room might find and accept as her full savings. Alongside the coins, however, there was a square of paper, folded once. In it there were six names, in handwriting that was tight and clear.

Ellen Marsh Ruth Calder Agnes Dowd Harriet Fenn Eleanor Mercer Frances Cole The names meant nothing to her, but there was a day next to each name. A window of time, as well. Thursday, mostly, with one Tuesday. And two names with no days. Oh, Alice, she thought with worry, what were you doing on Thursdays. Even worse, or better, since she did need a weapon, there was a knife. Bone-handled, short-bladed, definitely not a kitchen knife. She turned it over.

The blade had been recently oiled, and looked to be the most expensive thing in the room. This was a knife that was being maintained by someone who used it often. And the last item, a square of oilcloth, soft from handling, folded many times. She opened it on the floorboards in front of her. It was a hand-drawn map. Four or five city blocks in the same tight handwriting. Three buildings marked, one circled.

Two marginal notes, faint, and one at the bottom, pressed harder than everything else around it, as if the moment had required a steadier hand: Don't come twice. She set the bag, the knife, and the map in a row on the floor and looked at them for a moment. A flower girl with a secret stash of money, a maintained knife, and a map with a building circled and a warning pressed into the paper. Whoever this woman had been, and whatever she had been doing on Thursdays, it had gotten her killed.

And now it was her problem. She let the thought settle. Reflected on it a little bit. And then she let what it actually meant settle too. Her problem. Alice's problem. Not Cora's. Not the problem of a dead psychology graduate who had been going to die of cancer anyway, who had booked a one-way ticket for a vacation in Lisbon before a stranger with a knife had decided otherwise. Cora was on a pavement in a London two centuries away. Whatever Cora had been planning to become, she wasn't going to become it.

But this room existed. And the pitch on Aldgate Row existed. And the two pounds fourteen under the floor and a knife someone had kept sharp and a map with one building circled all existed, and someone had to be the person who owned these things. She packed everything back. The coins, the knife, the map folded exactly as she had found it. She placed the board back carefully. She kept eight shillings out for Friday, enough to buy stock, to pay for food, for lodging, enough to begin.

Then she sat on the edge of the bed and made a decision. She had lived a life, and lost it before she was ready. She was getting a second chance, not a third. Cora's world was gone, her degree, her friend, her hopes and dreams. None of it was coming. What was here was a room. A life. And a name. She would be Alice.

She would be Alice Darling, flower seller from Pell Street, and she would not tell a single living person otherwise, not ever, not for any reason, not when it was convenient and not when she trusted someone. There was no version of this where she told anyone. This was the truth of what she was now, and it was going to stay in this room with her until she was done with it. She let herself fall onto the bed. It was not grief, exactly. Grief would have felt like losing something.

This felt like a door, and she had the handle, and she had chosen to close it. She looked at the chrysanthemum in the box on the windowsill.

"I'm going to find out what happened on Thursdays," she told it, which was a somewhat strange thing to say to a dead flower, but with death, standards had shifted. She got up, and went downstairs to see about the soup.