Chapter 55 – Sunday

The Cathedral door closed behind her with a sound that belonged to the building and not to her, and the city came back all at once—the noise, the smell, the grey weight of an afternoon that hadn’t decided what it wanted to be. The air was colder than it had been an hour ago. The clouds had thickened while she’d been sitting in the nave, pressing low over the rooftops in a heavy, closing mass that was swallowing the last pale breaks of sky, and the light that came through them was thinning, losing its direction, the kind that would flatten shadows entirely once the gaps were gone.

Florence stopped on the steps. Her eyes found them immediately.

They were thirty yards ahead, moving along the pavement toward the junction where the Cathedral grounds met the main road. Eliza walked the way she always seemed to walk—briskly, with direction, her coat buttoned to the collar and her stride eating the flagstone in clean, measured intervals. William was half a step behind and slightly to the left, his longer legs adjusting to her pace.

She didn’t run. Running would have been a decision, and decisions could be argued with. Her boots found the pavement and her legs carried her forward at a walk that was faster than a walk and slower than anything that could be called urgent, and her satchel bumped against her hip with each stride, the canvas strap cutting a familiar groove across her shoulder.

She caught them at the junction.

“Florence.”

William said it first. He had turned at the sound of her footsteps—quick, alert, his weight already shifting before he’d fully turned—and his expression moved through recognition, confusion, and the opening syllable of alarm in the space of a single breath.

Eliza turned a beat later. The corner of her mouth moved.

“No,” William said.

Florence opened her mouth.

“No,” William repeated, raising a hand. The gesture was firm, the palm flat. “Miss Bannerman. Florence. Absolutely not.”

“I can help,” Florence said.

“You are a civilian.” William’s voice had dropped into a register she hadn’t heard from him before—not the earnest, slightly over-explaining tone from the pew, but something flatter, more procedural. The voice of a man citing protocol because protocol was the only weapon he had against the expression on her face. “This is an active D.A.A. field operation. You are not trained, you are not authorised, and you are—with the greatest possible respect—seventeen years old.”

“I know how old I am.”

“Then you know that your brother is a Senior Inspector who would have my badge, my pension, and both of my kneecaps if I let his sister walk into an operational theatre.”

“Thomas isn’t here.”

“That is the opposite of reassuring.”

The wind picked up. It came from the east, funnelled between the buildings, carrying the mineral smell of rain that hadn’t fallen yet. A few strands of Florence’s hair lifted and caught against her mouth. She pushed them back.

“William,” she said. “The pickpocket took everything Thomas gave me for the week. It’s my case.”

“It is not your case. It is a D.A.A. case that happens to involve your stolen property, which is a very different thing, and the correct procedure is to file a report with the Constabulary and let—”

“You’re right,” Florence said.

William stopped. The agreement had arrived where he’d been expecting resistance, and it took the momentum out of his sentence like a wheel hitting a ditch.

“I should have filed a report,” Florence continued. “I didn’t. That was a mistake.” She said it plainly, without performance, and she meant it. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

She looked past him, at Eliza.

Eliza had not spoken.

She was standing with her weight on one leg, her arms folded loosely across her chest, her head tilted at the slow, appraising angle that Florence was beginning to understand meant she was enjoying herself. The wind pressed the collar of her coat against her jaw. Her eyes moved between Florence and William, unhurried, tracking the volley without entering it

“Eliza,” William said, turning to her. The word was an appeal and an accusation. “Tell her.”

Eliza raised an eyebrow.

“Tell her what, precisely?”

“That she can’t come.”

“She seems quite determined, William. I’m not sure telling her will achieve the desired result.”

“Then order her.”

“I don’t have jurisdiction over civilians. You just said so yourself. Quite passionately, I thought.”

William stared at her. His mouth opened. Closed. He turned back to Florence, and the look on his face was the look of a man standing between two walls that were both moving toward him.

“Florence,” he said, and the procedural voice was gone, replaced by something more honest and more tired. “I’m asking you. Please. Go back inside. Anywhere else.. We’ll handle this, and when it’s done, I will personally ensure that your property is returned to you and that the report is filed under your name. You have my word.”

Florence looked at him. She believed him. He meant every syllable, and if she turned around and walked back through those doors, he would do exactly what he said. He would file the report. He would recover the money. He would be thorough and principled and good.

“I can be useful,” Florence said.

“We have a backup unit on standby,” William said. “Full response capability. If anything happens—”

“William,” Eliza said, still looking at Florence. “What was the name of the cultist at the Swan? The one with the axe.”

William frowned. “The—which one?”

“The large one. The one with the fire axe.” Eliza’s tone had the flat, recitative quality of someone pulling from a file she’d read that morning. “Thomas’s report mentions a cultist on the eastern flank, heading for a wounded man. Someone intercepted him.” She tilted her head. “Remind me who that was.”

William said nothing. He knew where this was going. Florence could see it in the way his jaw tightened—not with anger, but with the weary recognition of a man watching a door close that he’d been trying to hold open.

“I believe,” Eliza continued, “that the axe-wielder was rendered unconscious by a seventeen-year-old medical student in a plum dress, who then took possession of the weapon and returned to her patient.” She paused. “Under fire.”

“That was different,” William managed. “That was survival. This is—”

“I’ll stay out of the way,” Florence said. “I won’t interfere. Just let me be useful.”

The last words came out plain and undecorated. They sat on the pavement between the three of them, and the wind carried them nowhere.

William looked at Eliza. The appeal in his expression had curdled into something closer to resignation. He knew—Florence could see that he knew—that the decision had already been made, and that his objections, however valid, however principled, however likely to feature prominently in the disciplinary hearing that Thomas Bannerman would inevitably demand, were not going to change the outcome.

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“If something happens to her,” William said, quietly, to Eliza, “Thomas will kill us.”

“Thomas will kill me,” Eliza corrected. “You’ll receive a strongly worded memorandum.” She turned and started walking toward the main road, one hand rising to flag an approaching carriage. “There’s a difference.”

“There really isn’t.”

“There is if you’re the one writing the memorandum.”

Florence fell into step beside them. The satchel sat against her hip, light and empty, and the first drop of rain landed on the back of her hand—cold, singular.

William looked at her. His expression was complicated—equal parts concern and the grudging, slightly wounded acceptance of a man who had argued his case well and lost it anyway.

“Stay behind us,” he said. “At all times. If I tell you to move, you move. If I tell you to run, you run. If you feel anything—anything at all—that seems wrong, you tell me immediately. Not Eliza. Me. She’ll ignore it.”

“I don’t ignore things,” Eliza called from ahead, where she was already climbing into the carriage. “I prioritise them.”

“She ignores things,” William said to Florence.

Florence nodded. “I understand.”

William held the carriage door. He looked at her one more time—a long, searching look that was trying to find a reason to change his mind and failing.

“Catherine makes a bread that could convert a heathen,” he said. “If you get hurt, I will never taste that bread again, because I will be dead. Thomas will have killed me. Do you understand the stakes?”

Florence smiled. “I’ll bake you a better one.”

William opened his mouth. Something behind his expression buckled—the instinctive, almost offended loyalty of a man whose fiancée’s baking had just been challenged—but before he could mount a defence, Eliza’s voice carried from ahead.

“It’s going to start pouring any second, William. Move,” said Eliza from inside the carriage.

William looked at the sky, as though it might offer him an ally that the ground had refused to provide.