He nodded, touching his cap, and let her go. She turned to go back down the beach, away from him. She kept her walking stick handy to poke at the bunches of seaweed. Jet often washed up with them - well, jet and everything that pretended to be jet, it seemed. Sea coal and regular coal and black rocks from the cliff and who knew what else.
Annice made it a good half mile down to the end of the beach, down where the shore dropped off into cliff and ocean, with the farms above. She hadn’t spotted anything coming south. She stood there, staring out into the ocean for a good twenty minutes, until the wind got to be too much. Some people might decide, then and there, that it would be easier and faster to just jump into the ocean and be done with it. But that was letting the world win, and more to the point, someone might see her and send the lifeboat men out after her. That wouldn’t do anyone any good.
In the end, she turned back, keeping her eyes on the ground. This time, maybe to make things worse, she found jet. More than one piece, and more than something tiny. There was a piece a third the size of her palm, not the largest she’d seen unworked, but up there. And then along it, mostly buried under seaweed and debris, there were half a dozen smaller pieces. Each of them would make a pendant, two might make a matched set of earrings. She double checked them. After all these years, she could tell coal from jet from bitumen, the way they felt in her hands. But she always tested on a bit of porcelain. No sense hauling the wrong thing up the hill. And there was even less sense in getting her hope up.
It was all jet, and she walked back now, pausing twice more for smaller pieces. She bought a pint at the pub, as the price of entry to the back courtyard where the portal was. Twenty minutes later, she was coming out at the portal in Whitby proper. She pulled her coat around her as she walked into the wind, and then finally up to the shop and the flat above.
The shop was, of course, entirely quiet. Everything was still in its place. There was no reason it shouldn’t be. There was no one here to make the place feel alive. Annice certainly didn’t manage that most days. And whatever else happened, the people in town had respect. They respected Grandad and Nan. They’d leave the shop alone even if they disapproved of Annice herself. Big cities had to worry about things, vandalism or people making free. Here, all her neighbours knew her, for better and for worse.
A few minutes later, she was staring at the keep-cold cupboard, pulling out a bit of bread and cheese. Enough to keep her going for a bit. She didn’t want to wait for the kettle, instead eating standing up at the counter before washing up the plate, then her hands. She dried them properly. Annice didn’t want her hands to slip. Then she changed into a working dress, something that wouldn’t be harmed more by dust and grime.
She climbed the stairs to the attic workshop, lighting the charmlight over the bench, pulling on her apron, and then settling down. Annice had a half-finished piece, working with the hand tools. She’d already shaped it using the long row of cutting wheels and grindstones down the other side of the workshop, working bit by bit.
Now she was working on a rose, shifting her tools to coax petal after petal out of the surface without chipping the jet off. Grandad had taught her the charms for it, besides the manual tools, that gave them a bit of an edge. She wasn’t feeling it, though, and after a couple of minutes, she shifted over to the hand drill and its foot pedal. She got it spinning smoothly before picking up the drill and beginning again.
The jet worked its magic, as it nearly always did. Within a minute or two, Annice was lost in what she was doing. There was nothing else but the piece in front of her, the angle of the light, the way the petals were beginning to take a sheen and polish. More of that would come later. When she finally came to a stop, her neck and back were aching. Her hands - and face, not that she could see it - were coated with brownish-black dust, thick enough in some places to crack off as she shifted. And the light outside the attic had gone from afternoon to twilight well into night.
Not like she had to keep to anyone else’s schedule. That was the thing. Slowly, Annice uncurled herself, putting the rose in progress in the box on the centre of the table before she did anything else. She didn’t need to drop it, maybe break it, or have to scrabble under the workbench for it. Then, just as carefully, she stood up, stepping back so she wouldn’t dislodge any of the tools if she got clumsy.
Then, step by step, she made her way out of the workshop, dismissing the charmlight as she closed the door behind her. Washing up took forever, and left her shivering, because she hadn’t bothered to heat the water up more than the bare minimum. She couldn’t spare the magic for it and didn’t want to spend for the fuel or time it’d take to do it the other way round. She’d warm up, eventually.
Back in the kitchen, she heated a bit of soup to go with the last heel of bread. Annice ate quickly, feeling the exhaustion overwhelm her. She could feel everything falling away as soon as she’d got into bed, unable to keep her eyes open. It’d be one of those nights, at least. Not one of the ones where she was awake for what had to be hours, staring at the ceiling in the dark.
Chapter4
MARCH 3RD IN WHITBY
Two days later, Annice had the shop open. She’d arranged things pleasantly enough, and the light coming in through the shop windows lent a warmth to things that seemed hopeful. It had been a quiet day, but she’d expected that. It was barely into March, and the tourist trade wouldn’t pick up until May. But there were always some people there to take the sea air, at least that was consistent, even if there weren’t many of them.
She’d had a slow trickle. A couple of the wives from down the street had stopped in to see how she was doing. That was kind, though she never knew what to say to them. Yes, she was fine. She wasn’t, but not in a way that fit into the social niceties. She accepted an invitation to tea later in the week from Mrs Watts. They were non-magical, so there were even more things Annice couldn’t explain or talk about. But the Watts were doing well enough that Annice didn’t feel like she was taking food the family needed if she said yes.
Mrs Allen, the woman with her, she would have. They were a family with more mouths than money, and that was a hard path, no matter what sort of face she put on it. And while fishing paid well when there were fish, it was a risky trade. Not just in the fishing, though that was a big part of it, but in whether it paid much in the way of a catch.
It gave Annice something, no matter how small, to look forward to late in the week. Then there had been a number of people going by and waving from the outside, but not coming in. That was the thing about having the shop open. Back before, a year ago, or two or five, Nan would have been the one sitting down here, chatting away. And Annice and Grandad would have been up in the attic, making pieces to sell.
Annice couldn’t do both at once. No magic she’d ever heard of let someone be in two places, doing two different things entirely, all in the same moment. So even if she wanted to sell her carving, she’d have to make them at times no one wanted the shop. Evenings, Sundays - it helped she wasn’t religious much at all, though she made a proper show of going to church. If she didn’t, people talked.
The door opened, and Annice looked up. No one she knew, which meant visitors, not town folk. “Good morning.” Annice kept her voice cheerful. “Come in, please. I’d be glad to show you pieces up close.”
“Oh, we’re just visiting.” That was a younger woman, though not exactly young, maybe a bit older than Annice herself. The other two women were older, plump, and not, Annice thought, the sort to favour jet jewellery. They weren’t dressed in the latest fashions, of course, but they wore brighter colours, the ones in the fashion plates. “But the shop looked interesting.”
“I’d be glad to tell you a bit about jet, perhaps? Even if you don’t want to buy, we are famous for it. It would be something to tell your friends later?” Annice made herself smile again. She’d done this lecture before, hundreds of times, and Nan had always been much better at it. She kept hearing her grandmother’s voice whenever she tried, the way Nan would pause, get people laughing and smiling. Sometimes those laughs had turned into a letter, later, asking to buy this thing or that, if arrangements could be made.
She did have a slight advantage over Nan. Mam had been a schoolteacher for a little, and she’d picked up and kept the sort of elocution that people from outside Yorkshire found easier to make sense of. And she’d taught it to Annice, of course. And of course Da had it naturally, from his own people and the school he’d gone to. It set her apart in town, even though she could and did speak both ways when it was called for.
The women hesitated, then the younger one, the daughter, nodded. “We have a few minutes, perhaps. And need a little breather before tackling the steps.”
“Ah, you want to climb up to the abbey? That does take a bit of effort!” The hundred ninety-nine steps that led up to the now ruined abbey above were worth climbing. The view was stunning, but the hike didn’t seem the sort of thing these women were entirely used to. “Here, let me pull out a stool or two. You can sit while we talk.” A minute or two later, they were settled on broad stools. Annice had shared out cups of tea, and they were agreeably inclined to listen.
Annice went through the talk about how they’d found jet buried as grave goods, going back thousands of years. She leaned heavily on the fact it was like amber. It had come from something that had been living, once, long ago. Mighty trees in vast forests had fallen, been buried, and a combination of time and pressure and minerals had turned the wood from wood into something far better.
She let her love for it show. There was a chance these women would laugh at her about it. Of course, some did. But if they did, they’d be out of the store and gone a few minutes from now. When Annice made a sale, it was almost always because she’d caught someone’s imagination. Once she’d laid out the older history, she said, “Now, of course, Whitby became famous because of Queen Victoria. When her beloved Prince Albert died, she declared jet to be the court stone for mourning, and she wore it for the rest of her life. Jet - the best quality jet, we think - is found only in a stretch of perhaps seven miles along this coast. It washes up. It was mined for years, though not these days. And we take it and make something beautiful. And - well.” Her voice got a little softer. This was personal. “Heavy enough to remind us of our grief, and light enough to wear every day. I’ve thought about that more and more, the last few years.”
There was a small silence before the oldest of the women said gently, “Lost someone dear, then?”
“My father, in the War, my mother a year after. And then, in the last year, my grandad and my nan.” The term confused them. They were not Yorkshire folk or northerners. “My grandmother, a common term around here.” Annice gestured at the shop. “My grandad was one of the best known jet carvers. My father had a love for it. He learned it after he let his love for my mother keep him here. And now I have the pieces they worked on to find a home for.”
It was all true, and it was also an ideal shift into the fact this was a shop. She tilted her head, not pushing at it. “I could bring out a few things for you to look at? Some of the older traditional pieces, and some of the newer?”
