Chapter 3

MARCH 1ST IN WHITBY, YORKSHIRE

A nnice 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.

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.