Chapter 44 – Burning Daylight

Florence carried the bowl and spoon downstairs, her footsteps finding the creaking boards with the instinct of someone who had already memorised which ones complained the loudest. The kitchen was warm and damp, the air thick with boiled oats and the lingering tang of Mrs. Gable’s morning tea. She washed the bowl in the stone sink, dried it with the dishcloth hanging from the nail, and set it back on the shelf beside the others.

Mrs. Gable was at the kitchen table, folding linen napkins into neat squares with the mechanical efficiency of a woman who could do it blindfolded and probably had. She looked up when Florence reached for her satchel on the hook by the back door.

“Off already?”

“University business,” Florence said, slinging the bag across her shoulder. The strap settled into the groove it had already worn into her coat. “Fittings for the uniform, apparently. The pamphlet made it sound quite involved.”

“Oh, it will be,” Mrs. Gable said, with the grim satisfaction of someone who had housed enough students to know. “They’ll have you standing on a box for an hour while a man with pins in his mouth tells you your posture’s crooked. Take a book.”

Florence smiled. She reached for the door handle, then stopped.

“Mrs. Gable—I’m terribly sorry, but I think I cracked one of your mugs this morning. The blue one with the stripe. The handle split.” She pulled her hand back from the door, clasping both in front of her the way she did when she was delivering bad news. “I’ll replace it.”

Mrs. Gable blinked. “Cracked? How on earth did you manage that?”

“I must have knocked it against the sill.” The lie arrived with a steadiness that would have troubled Florence more if she’d had the luxury of examining it. She was getting fluent in this particular language—half-truths, deflections, the careful architecture of plausible explanations for things that had no plausible explanation—and the fluency itself was the thing she liked least about the last two days. “I’ll find one just like it.”

“Oh, don’t be daft, love.” Mrs. Gable waved the apology away with a napkin. “That one’s been hanging on by spite since October. I’m surprised it lasted the winter. I’ve got a dozen in the cupboard.”

“Still. I—”

“Shoo.” Mrs. Gable flapped the napkin at her. “Go. Be measured. Stand on the box. You’re burning daylight.”

“Alice is sleeping,” Florence said, her hand on the latch. “She’s still running warm. If you could look in on her around noon—bring something up, maybe some broth if you have it? She won’t ask. She’ll tell you she doesn’t need anything. She’s—”

“Stubborn as a mule with a grudge?”

“I was going to say independent.”

“Same animal, different hat.” Mrs. Gable resumed her folding. “I already said I’ll see to her. Now go.”

Florence went.

The door closed behind her and Baker Street opened up like a sentence she’d only read in a book and was now being asked to speak aloud.

The morning was grey. Not the soft grey of overcast skies back home, where the clouds sat low and woolly and the light came through diffused and gentle. This was Dunwick grey—industrial, particulate, the colour of a city that burned ten thousand coal fires before breakfast and wore the evidence in its air. The buildings across the street were soot-darkened brick, three and four storeys tall, their ground-floor shop fronts just beginning to open. A grocer was hauling crates of turnips onto the pavement. A woman in a starched apron was washing the windows of a chemist’s shop with long, practised strokes. Somewhere down the block, a door opened and the smell of fresh bread hit Florence with a force that was nearly physical, and for one disorienting moment she was twelve years old and standing in the bakery at dawn, flour on her arms, her mother’s voice calling from the back room.

She blinked. The moment passed. She was standing on a doorstep in a city of four million people, and she had things to do.

Right, then.

She ran through the list while she adjusted the satchel strap. Fittings first. The pamphlet said the university tailor operated out of the east wing of the Merton Building, ground floor, mornings only, first-come basis. Then a walk of the campus. Library, lecture halls, the Anatomical Gardens. Get the lay of the place while it was still quiet, before term started and the corridors filled with people who already knew where they were going.

And if there was time after that—the Cathedral. St. Silas. The Reverend had said she was welcome.

You don’t have to be devout. Just present.

Florence had liked that. She had liked the woman who said it, too—calm, unhurried, the kind of person who could sit in a silence without needing to fill it. Florence was beginning to understand that this was a rarer quality than she’d assumed.

The satchel sat snug against her hip, heavier than a university pamphlet and a coin purse had any right to make it. The pamphlet was there—folded into the inner pocket, her temporary pass tucked inside it. The coin purse was there too, a small drawstring pouch of brown leather that Thomas had pressed into her hand at the end of their tour yesterday, before the Swan, when the afternoon was still golden and the worst thing in the world was the price of soup.

“For the week,” he’d said, folding her fingers closed around it before she could look inside and start arguing. “Fittings, supplies, whatever you need. Don’t count it, don’t thank me, and for the love of the Lord don’t try to give it back.”

She had counted it, of course. The moment he’d turned his back. Five gold Crowns and a scatter of silver Stags—enough to cover the fittings, a set of reference texts, and still have change left over for meals and tram fare through the first week of term. It was more than generous. It was Thomas, distilled into currency: excessive, earnest, and utterly unwilling to hear the word no.

And beneath the coin purse, wrapped in a kerchief and sitting at the very bottom of the bag where it wouldn’t shift. The revolver. Still loaded. Still there.

Florence had not yet worked out what to do about the revolver. It was a bandit’s gun, taken from a dead man’s belt in a cabin in the woods, and she was carrying it through the streets of Dunwick in a satchel that also contained her university credentials. The contradiction was not lost on her. She told herself it was temporary—that she’d find somewhere safe to store it, or unload it and hide the pieces, or perhaps throw it into the river if she could work up the nerve. But the memories of the last two days were still close enough to touch, and the weight of the gun at the bottom of her bag felt less like a liability and more like a promise that the next time the world tried to drag her somewhere dark, she would not go empty-handed.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

She was not sure what kind of person that made her. She suspected it was the kind of person who didn’t carry revolvers a week ago, and now did, and hadn’t fully reckoned with the distance between those two points.

Later. Think about it later.

Florence looked up the street. She could see the nearest tram stop from here—a cast-iron shelter at the corner of Baker and Harrowgate, already collecting a small crowd of morning commuters. Beyond it, the road widened into a commercial thoroughfare where carriages and carts jostled for space in the grey morning traffic. She knew, from the map she’d studied while she was still in Briar’s Crossing, that the University was roughly forty minutes’ walk northeast. Across the river, through the Greybridge district, up the long hill toward the old quarter where the spires of the academic buildings rose above the rooftops like stone fingers reaching for something they couldn’t quite grasp.

She could take the tram. Line Four ran directly from Harrowgate to the University gate, with two transfers. Or a cab—she’d seen them queuing at the rank on the next street over, black-lacquered coaches with polished brass lamps and drivers who looked like they charged by the syllable.

She looked at the tram stop. She looked at the street ahead.

No.

Thomas had taken her through the city yesterday in a carriage, pointing things out through the window, narrating the streets like a tour guide with a personal stake in the architecture. It had been wonderful. But it had also been his Dunwick—the version he’d built for himself over years of living here, twelve blocks wide, fitted to his routines. She had seen it through his eyes, from his seat, at his pace.