Chapter 52 – The Interest

“Well, well,” Eliza said, her voice pitched low enough for the nave but carrying a warmth that said she’d just been handed a gift she hadn’t asked for. She stopped at the end of Florence’s pew, one gloved hand resting on the oak, her head tilting in that slow, appraising angle Florence remembered from the ruins. “The Saintess of the Swan. In her natural habitat.”

Florence’s face heated instantly. “Please don’t.”

“I’m only observing.” Eliza’s grin didn’t move. “The newspapers neglected to mention the halo, though. The light from that window is doing something rather flattering behind your head. Very canonical.”

Florence glanced up involuntarily. The gold band from the west window had shifted again and was, in fact, falling directly across the top of her pew. She looked back at Eliza with the helplessness of someone who could not even rely on the architecture to stay neutral.

William stepped up beside Eliza. He looked different from the wreckage—cleaner, steadier, the field coat replaced by his standard-issue leather, though the same fundamental earnestness sat behind his eyes. He inclined his head, a small, precise motion.

“Miss Bannerman,” he said. “It’s good to see you again. Under considerably better circumstances.”

Florence smiled. It came easier than she expected.

“It’s good to see you too, William,” she said. “How is Catherine?”

William blinked. The surprise was fleeting—a half-second of recalibration as he registered that Florence had remembered a name mentioned once, in passing, while he was being crushed beneath her brother’s torso. A small, pleased expression settled across his features.

“She’s well, thank you. She made shortbread last night. Said it was for me, but I suspect she just wanted the kitchen to smell nice.” He paused. “She was relieved to hear I wasn’t present for the fight at the Swan. She worries.”

“She has reason to,” Florence said, glancing at Eliza.

“She has William to,” Eliza corrected, arriving at the pew. She looked at the space beside Florence, then at Florence, and tilted her head. The gesture was oddly courteous for a woman who had, less than forty-eight hours ago, circled Florence in the rubble of a bombing and declared her adorable.

Eliza didn’t wait for an invitation. She stepped into the pew and sat beside Florence with the unhurried ease of a woman settling into a theatre box, leaving a hand’s width of space between them that was either courteous or calculated. She crossed one leg over the other, the leather of her coat creaking softly against the oak, and placed her gloved hands in her lap.

William took the pew in front. He turned, folding his arms across the back of it. The posture was easy, informal, the stance of a man who had sat through enough long conversations to know where to put his weight. He looked at Florence and waited.

“You know,” Eliza said, looking up at the vaulted ceiling with an expression of mild appraisal, “I haven’t been inside St. Silas since I was eleven. My mother used to drag me here every Solstice morning. I spent most of the service counting the ribs.” She gestured upward with one finger, a lazy, circling motion. “Forty-six in the nave. Twelve in the chancel. I was a very bored child.”

She lowered her gaze back to Florence, and the grin was still there. It had settled into something watchful.

“How are you, Florence?”

Florence considered the question.

“Honestly?” she said. “It’s been a difficult morning.”

“Mm,” Eliza said. Not a prompt. Not a dismissal.

Florence looked at her properly for the first time since she’d sat down.

Something was wrong.

It took a moment to identify, because Eliza Harlowe was the kind of woman whose composure functioned as camouflage—the posture, the gloves, the theatrical tilt of the chin all conspired to project a version of the woman that was so aggressively fine it discouraged closer inspection. But Florence had spent two years learning to read the things a body said when the mouth was busy lying, and Eliza’s body was saying quite a lot.

The pallor was the most obvious tell. Eliza’s skin, which Florence remembered as fair but warm-toned in the gaslight of the Swan, had gone the colour of parchment left too long in a window. There was a tightness around her eyes that didn’t match the ease of her posture, a faint, drawn quality to the muscles of her jaw that suggested sustained effort being held in place by will alone. Her breathing was fractionally shallow. Not distressed—controlled. The kind of controlled that happened when the body wanted to pant and the owner wouldn’t let it.

And there was something else—something Florence had no name for. A low, physical awareness, the kind that lived beneath thought. Sitting this close, shoulders nearly touching, she could feel it: a rhythm that wasn’t hers, faint and wrong, like a pulse heard through a wall. Something in Eliza was working too hard. Florence didn’t know how she knew. She simply did.

“You look terrible,” Florence said.

The words were out before she could stop them. Her hand went to her mouth. “I’m sorry. That was—I didn’t mean—”

William made a sound from the pew in front. It was small and involuntary and sat somewhere between a cough and the opening syllable of a laugh that had been strangled at birth. He pressed his lips together and studied the ceiling with sudden, intense interest.

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Eliza blinked. The surprise held for half a second before it dissolved into something genuinely delighted.

“I look terrible?” she repeated. “Florence Bannerman, the Saintess of the Swan, the gentlest creature to grace the morning papers, just told me I look terrible. In a cathedral.” She placed a hand over her heart. “William, are you hearing this?”

“I heard nothing,” William said to the ceiling.

“I’m sorry,” Florence said again, her face burning. “I only meant—you’re pale. Very pale. And your breathing is off. Are you ill?”

The amusement in Eliza’s expression shifted. It didn’t leave—amusement, Florence was beginning to understand, did not leave Eliza so much as rearrange itself into different configurations—but something beneath it surfaced.

“She’s not ill,” William said. He had turned back to face them, his arms folded on the pew, his chin resting on his forearms. “She’s just tired. She overextended herself this morning on a procedure that was—and I’m quoting the department physician—’inadvisable bordering on idiotic.'”

“The department physician is sixty-three years old and smells of camphor,” Eliza said. “His opinions are expired.”

“He also said you should be in bed.”

“I’m in a cathedral. Close enough.” Eliza gestured at the nave. “Besides, the mana concentration in here is worth more than his camphor and bedrest combined. I’m not even spent to the point of mana sickness.”