Chương 7: Chapter Seven: A Penny a Day and Other Disappointments

By Wednesday she had the economics of being Alice Darling fairly well worked out and they were not encouraging. Three days on the pitch, and she had the shape of it. A good day on Aldgate Row brought in somewhere between one shilling and two shillings six pence, depending on stock, weather, and whether the constable's patrol schedule put respectable foot traffic past her corner at the right hours.

After stock costs and the weekly rent at number fourteen and food, which she was trying to keep modest without actively suffering, she was left with only a few pence of leftover money per day. This amount was, by any reasonable measure, survival. Even worse, while her social skills leveled up some and some skills like [Arithmetic] and [Map Building] progressed just through practice, others barely changed at all.

At this rate, her skill progression was going to take the better part of a decade, and her Vigour bar was going to spend that decade at approximately the level of someone who could be taken out with the flu. Alice had been working on not finding this distressing, to mixed results. She had, at least, found some good news while counting her money that morning. Given that the total came to two shillings and fourpence, the timing said something either about her sad [Arithmetic] or about the system's sense of humour.

Progression threshold met. You have leveled up! The more interesting discovery happened on Thursday morning, at the Gant Street Yard. She had been at the market long enough, and with some help from fellow flower girls, to know the patterns, such as who arrived first, who had the best stock, which supplier adjusted prices based on how lost you looked, when a woman she didn't recognise appeared at the far end of the yard with a basket that was different from everyone else's. The flowers were too vivid.

Not carefully tended vivid, not the hothouse vivid of expensive cultivated stock, but almost over-saturated in color and liveliness. She stood and watched the woman set up and watched the price she wrote, and then watched five buyers descend on the basket in barely an hour. Three times the going rate. Sold out before eight in the morning. Alice bought her dahlias from the woman with the red apron and kept an eye on the seller with the vivid stock.

"Where does she get those?" she said to Meg, who was arranging oranges nearby. Meg glanced up.

"Mmm. Goes out the northeast gate, most likely. Early morning. She comes in once a week, maybe less. Sells out fast." She looked at Alice, as if what she was about to share was obvious.

"Wild stock. You can tell from the colour."

"Is it common? Going out for it?"

"Common enough for the desperate. And foolish, some would say." She picked up an orange, put it down.

"Pay's better for obvious reasons." Alice did not know what the obvious reasons were, but wanted to learn. She asked Nell about it at the pitch that afternoon, because Nell was the most reliably direct person she had encountered in Londinium and had yet to tell her anything that wasn't accurate, however odd. Nell was sorting matchboxes as she listened to the question.

"Wild gathering," she said without looking up.

"There are people who do it."

"Past the gate."

"Outside the city, yes." A matchbox went into the keep pile.

"The church wards stop at the wall. Everybody knows that. Outside the boundary it's open ground, marshes, mostly, northeast. Then forest." She set another box aside.

"Things live out there. Dangerous creatures. They can't come inside the city though." Alice had not known there were such things as church wards or even other creatures other than the demons she had been encountering inside Londinium, so she was not sure how secure these so-called wards were.

"How dangerous?" she asked. Nell looked at her properly now. Her expression was pinched, as if she was being honest because she had to be, not because she wanted to.

"People die," she said.

"Not constantly. But regularly. The guild licenses some collectors. They've got training and commissions and a knight escort for the deep runs. Licensed gatherers come back. People who just go out because the money's good and they reckon they can manage it…" A small pause.

"Some of them come back too."

"How many is some?" Alice asked.

"Not many," Nell said, without any additional softening. A woman stopped at the stall for chrysanthemums, and Alice sold them and made change and thanked her, and the woman moved on. Nell watched this quietly and said, "You're thinking about going." A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"I'm thinking about a lot of things." Nell looked at her for a moment in the careful way she had, one that Alice suspected saw through most things but chose not to comment, and then went back to her matchboxes.

"The northeast gate," she said.

"Opens at five. Don't go past the reed beds your first time." Alice took this in, somewhat unsurprised.

"That sounds like experienced advice."

"It's information," Nell said.

"You can do what you like with it."

She arrived at Crane Street at the appointed time, and knocked twice on the surgery door. Hyde answered himself, which meant the housekeeper was elsewhere. He was in shirtsleeves, which he fixed down in the time it took to step aside and let her in, and the tonic was already on the small table by the chair.

"You came," he said, sounding relieved.

"You said Thursday," she said.

"I did." He gestured to the chair.

"Sit. Let me look at the wound." She sat, and he checked the dressing with the same quiet focus she remembered from what was now mere days ago but felt longer, hands careful, expression neutral but warm, pausing at times to write something in his notes.

"It's healing extremely well," he said.

"Better than I would have predicted, given where we started." He said this with a faint amount of professional satisfaction undercut by unvoiced curiosity. The second column of his notes received something brief.

"I feel much better," she said.

"You look it." He settled into his chair, pushed the tonic toward her, and picked up his own cup.

"How is the pitch?"

"Manageable." She accepted the tonic, which was bitter and almost certainly good for something she couldn't identify. Despite her misgivings about doctors at this time, she had come to accept that magic was involved in medicine and to just be grateful for the free healthcare.

"Slow."

"Slow how?"

"The income is modest," she said.

"I've been thinking about supplementing it. Wild gathering… I'm told some people go out northeast for the stock." Hyde's expression did something she had not yet seen from him. It was surprise, genuine surprise, or performed so well she couldn't tell otherwise, before fixing itself back to a somewhat more professional reaction and failing.

"Miss Darling," he said.

"That is not…" He stopped and rethought his words.

"Wild gathering is a licensed profession. There are guild-registered collectors, hunters, knights operating under church commission. They train for it. They go in groups. They have guild-backed contracts that cover medical costs, equipment, and extraction if something goes wrong." He set the cup down with rather more care than usual.

"An untrained and unlicensed person going out alone would have none of that. No support, no guaranteed treatment, no legal framework protecting them if they come back injured. And the wards do not extend past the gate. Outside the boundary…" Another pause, briefer than the first.

"Outside the boundary there are things that the wards exist to keep away from us. Licenced hunters and collectors exist because it requires considerable preparation and somebody has to manage them." He had said all of this as if working from institutional knowledge alone. She listened to it carefully, because any knowledge was useful, but she didn't think she was ready to be swayed on this.

"I understand the risks," she said.

"I'm not suggesting being reckless."

"The risks," Hyde said carefully, "are not the kind that respond well to intentions." He looked at her for a moment, then sighed.

"You're going to go regardless." It wasn't a question.

"I haven't decided yet," she said, which was not quite a lie. He accepted this with the equanimity of a man who did not believe a single word she said. He reached for his cup again.

"If you go," he said, "come back here. In fact, I request that you come here every week. Whatever state you're in when you return, come here first." He said this without looking up from the tea.

"I'd like to know you came back." It was the most he had offered her directly. The warmth of it was genuine enough that she found she had nothing to say to it. Cyril Hyde was genuinely a kind person, she had found.

"Thank you," she said. He refilled her cup without asking. They talked for another twenty minutes about nothing of consequence, the weather, the bakery on Crane Street, a novel she had borrowed and not yet returned, and she left with another book in her bag and the surgery lit behind her as she walked back toward Pell Street. Alice pulled up the screen in the quiet stretch between Crane Street and the chandler's corner where the foot traffic thinned enough to look at something nobody else could see.

STATUS Name: Alice Darling Race: Human (Common) Class: Novice Thief Level: 3 (Rank: Ignota) Title: Chosen One Conditions Malnourished · Minor Anaemia · Persistent Cough · Anathema (Alien) Attributes Vigour Lv. 3 (22/30) Acuity Lv. 6 (55/60) Skills Tier 2 (Uncommon): RESTRICTED Tier 1 (Common): [Arithmetic] Lv. 3 · [Advertise] Lv. 2 · [Bluff] Lv. 3 · [Britannian Language] Lv. 2 · [Convince] Lv. 3 · [Disguise] Lv. 1 · [Drop Safely] Lv. 1 · [Feign Ignorance] Lv. 3 · [Francian Language] Lv. 1 · [Garden] Lv.

1 · [Hide] Lv. 1 · [Lie] Lv. 3 · [Maintain Alias] Lv. 2 · [Map Building] Lv. 2 · [Mending] Lv. 1 · [Notice Detail] Lv. 3 · [Observe] Lv. 3 · [Pick Pocket] Lv. 1 · [Prusijan Language] Lv. 1 · [Reading and Writing] Lv. 2 · [Recall] Lv. 2 · [Silent Step] Lv. 1 · [Spot Tail] Lv. 1 · [Sprint] Lv. 1 · [Squeeze Through] Lv. 1 · [Local Slang] Lv. 1 · [Tailoring] Lv. 1 · [Threat Detection] Lv. 1 · [Vault] Lv. 1 · [Weaving] Lv.

1 Quests Main Quest: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Sub-Quest: Find the White Rabbit Sub-Quest: Off With Her Head