There were nods from all of them. “Monday by noon, then, to allow time for duplication and any questions. Any last comments before we adjourn?” There were none, and this time Griffin stood, waiting for the others to file out, talking. Antimony went with Captain Donovan. They clearly had more to discuss. When everyone was gone, Griffin sank back into the wheelchair.
Charlus cleared his throat. “So, when should I be here on Saturday?”
“You don’t need to.” Griffin said it automatically. This was his choice. He wouldn’t demand Charlus match him. But then he watched Charlus’s face and smiled, softening it. “I could use your help. The library, at ten. I’ll likely be there from nine.” The library was upstairs. It would mean hoping the lift behaved, or taking his time with the crutches on the stairs, but he’d just factor that in. “Sunday, possibly at my flat, depends how much of the research we get done.”
“It’ll go faster with two.” Charlus sounded rather pleased, actually. “I’ll go see to writing up the notes. Meet you in your office before end of day.”
Griffin nodded. Charlus went off in search of his typewriter. Griffin gave everyone else a minute to clear out of the hallways before wheeling himself back to his own office and into the ordinary and substantial pile of work waiting for him.
Chapter3
MARCH 1ST IN WHITBY, YORKSHIRE
Annice was making her way slowly along the beach. It had been a bad day for jet. Near everything she’d turned up had been coal - tempting at first glance and wrong at a second. Worse, the weather felt unsettled. She probably should have opened up the shop, in hopes of a customer or two. But it was March, it was chilly, and experience told her no one would buy. At least if she was looking for jet, she was doing something that might, eventually, be useful.
So she’d made the trek - all five and a half miles - down this morning, by foot. She’d go back by the portal, as much because of the hills as the distance itself. But walking one way saved her some coin, and that mattered.
The beach at Bay Town, what people elsewhere called Robin Hood’s Bay, had been quiet, with few people out. It was March, after all, scarcely a time even for hardy Yorkshire bathers. She’d been out for a good two hours - she had maybe another before the tide caught up with her.
But then she caught a motion up ahead of her, a man in a billowing oilskin. The light was behind him. Then she got a better angle. “Bill.” She waved.
He hesitated for just a second, and then she knew what was wrong. What else was wrong, to add to a long list? He gestured at one of the massive boulders, up against the cliff face, a bit out of sight. “Miss.”
Annice picked her way over, carefully. The last thing she needed was to twist her ankle, and she made a quick gesture, averting bad luck. Or more bad luck. Not that she felt it worked, given the number of things in her life that had not been averted at all. When she was perched on the rock, she nodded. “Bill.”
“Been meaning to come see you, Annice.” Bill Askey was well into his sixties, the generation between Grandad and Dad. Annice nodded, not wanting him to go on, but better to get this over with. “I can’t be bringing you more jet.”
Annice did her best to keep tight composure. “There any reason I can do something about?”
“Nah. People are talking, that’s the thing. Saying you’re the one going to be carving it, you have to be. And that’s no good, right? The custom being as it is.” Bill did not look happy to be saying this.
She wished she could tell custom to go hang, but she couldn’t. For one thing, she’d have to convince all the remaining jet carvers in town, magical and non-magical alike, and that was a hopeless cause. And then she’d have to convince everyone who’d mention one workshop over another, not that there was all that much of that going on these days. A decade ago had been the War. A decade before that, when she’d been apprenticing, people had still bought freely.
Now Annice nodded slowly. “Not even in private?”
“Now, Annice. You know word will get round.” He hesitated. There might be a fragment there. “No one can stop you looking. And if I find a big piece, unusual big, I could give you first look at it. But on the regular? No.”
It was as good an offer as she was going to get. And for the moment, she wasn’t desperately in need of more jet. Grandad had built up quite a collection, and carving that up would take her a good bit. She could do her own looking.
“Sure.” Annice swallowed. “Ta for at least telling me.”
“Ah, pet.” Bill looked a bit shattered. “Other people, just turning their backs, then? Hadn’t known it had got so bad.”
“Expected it.” Annice curled her arms around herself. “Thought it’d be faster if it happened, though.”
She’d always been a bit on the outside from the time she was born. Her mam and da spoke like educated folk. Mam had been a schoolteacher before she married, a year’s apprenticeship down south that taught her about more than Whitby. And Da had gone to Alethorpe, one of the five schools, before coming north. She’d grown up with some of Yorkshire’s burr in her voice, and some of the crispness of Da’s careful words. She was of Whitby, generations back, centuries, even. And she was different in ways that made everything impossible some days.
Bill shrugged. “People gave you the chance. Who knows, might have met a man who’d pick it up.”
“Like Da did.” Annice had grown up loving that story. Her mam had been the only child of her grandad and nan. She’d been whisked off her feet by Da, when he’d taken a position as a junior apothecary. He’d fallen for jet, like any sensible man might, just a hair slower than he’d fallen for Mam. “I didn’t. Not likely to now, either.”
She might have had a chance if there’d been more men. That was the thing. She wasn’t a great beauty, the sort who turned up in songs. But she might have made the sort of wife a man would think of fondly while he was at sea, wanting to come home to. It was a realistic sort of hope. Not that she’d appeal much right now, with her hair in a braid down her back, her dress darned in a couple of places, and faded all over.
But the thing was, there weren’t men. Not in her generation. They’d been calling it surplus women. Surplus to what, that had been Annice’s question since she heard it named. She could bloody well make her own life and do something good with it. Or she could have, if what she wanted was anything other than carving jet. Because whether there were men to do it or not, there were customs about jet carving. They had no room for her.
She might be able to make her life, but she did not know how. And she wasn’t a respectable sort of widow. At least then she might have taken in boarders or something. Annice could see it coming. She’d keep trying, until the money ran out, and then the hope, and she’d pack up and leave Whitby and take a position somewhere. Matron in a school, she could keep house well enough and keep track of things. Maybe a secretary or clerk or something, but they probably wanted someone with better handwriting and less of her odd sort of accent. Too educated for Whitby, too Northern for a proper office.
Bill had gone quiet. That was the thing. He might be Grandad’s age, but there wasn’t much he could do to help. There were lines of class and need and it made her head hurt. Finally, she swallowed. “See you around, I guess.” It sounded feeble - it was feeble - but it was the gesture.
