As she slipped into the maze that was Edinburgh, Eva realized she did miss the stony and winding streets, the chattering and self-absorbed hum of life, the warm sun cutting through the clouds and fog. As she shuffled into the sunlight, she peered under the brim of her hat at the crowded alley. Workers loading stock onto wagons, sour-faced customers, traveling laborers, and layabouts filled it from wall to wall, squeezing through every possible space.
It was claustrophobic, overwhelming-and wonderful. No one looked at her twice, disguised as she was.
But she couldn't linger. She either had to hide and wait out the husband's accusations and wrath elsewhere, or accomplish something. She had to find Victor. Otherwise, what was the point of walking out of that tiny tenement room?
When she found him, whoever he was, she would barrage him with every question that had run through her head the last several weeks.
Who was she?
Why could she remember nothing?
Why had that face—the first she'd ever known—turned on her?
Could he… She faltered, even just thinking the question. Could he tell her where her real home was? If she had others in her life who cared about her, regardless of how she looked?
That would be nice. As long as they weren't all monstrous like her. She winced at the thought. Not that she wouldn't be able to appreciate them, accept them, be one of them. But she could just picture the utter isolation a group of people like her might have to impose on themselves.
Luckily, the thought was also unlikely. Surely she'd have heard of such a group by now, even through Agatha's hearsay.
Eva shook her head, throwing Agatha back out of her mind. Her flatmate wasn't the most important thing right now; finding Victor was. And she'd never do that huddled here in the alley, not talking to anyone.
She sidled back from the wall, hugging her arms around herself to take up as little space as her large frame would allow, and approached a man with a sack thrown over his shoulder.
"I," she began, and then gave a little cough to try to make her voice less husky. "I am looking … Victor?"
"No," the laborer said impatiently. "On wi' ye, lad." He made a gesture for her to get out of his way.
She stood aside for the laborer to pass. Next time she woke up in an odd situation where she'd walk away with naught but a name, she thought sourly to herself, she was going to get a surname to go with it and spare herself the trouble.
Thick clouds rolled over the sky, cutting out the sun just as she exited this alley and turned into another crooked street. The dimness between the tenements deepened with shadows, a fresh chill biting into bare hands and faces.
But it was not this temporal change that made Eva pause. There was an odd weight and heat searing itself into her shoulders that made gooseflesh rise along her arms regardless of the cold. The weight of someone watching her.
And it was about this time that she realized the street behind her had emptied, carrying only the echoes of neighboring roads. Eva fidgeted with the seams inside her pockets and peered back over her shoulder.
She saw nothing but a peddler woman, now crouched against the wall and staring astonished into a pathway so narrow even an ordinary person couldn't stretch out their arms comfortably. But before Eva could turn herself about and question the woman, the peddler was back on her feet, abandoning her basket of fruits, and fleeing to the opposite end of the alley.
Eva felt her queries die on her lips. She considered the basket of fruit, wondering if she ought to take one, but suddenly found she had quite lost her appetite for apples.
By the time she reached the tiny gap between buildings to investigate for herself where the figure might have slid, she found nothing but shadows on bare brick and stone. A glance upward revealed only a strip of cold gray sky. Reluctant, Eva drew back, still touching the corner of the building where she'd leaned on it to peer up at the roof.
"Did ye see it?"
Eva turned around, snatching her hand back under her coat before someone could see. A nervous-looking, thin young man held a broom in both hands as if prepared to bash someone with it.
"Me ma says it were th' devil," he explained anxiously in an Irish brogue.
"Devil?" Eva repeated.
"There's a monster lurks these streets," he warned. "Comes out only at night. Some say he's a ghost … but it don't make him less real."
Eva shook her head once, lowering her eyes so that she would not draw the young man's fear to herself. "I saw nothing."
Devil-the very name she'd been given in her earliest days in Edinburgh. She felt a chill run over her neck.
The man with the broom left with a farewell she barely noticed, but life was beginning to return to the alleyway. No one seemed hostile yet, but Eva would take no chances. It would take only another glimpse, a shout, before someone seized sticks and stones—or guns.
Wonderful.
Eva stalked out of the lane with her hands buried deep in her pockets again. But when she looked up, she thought she caught the edge of a shadow, high above where no one else might have noticed.
Ghost or demon or simply mortal menace, she did not like being watched.
Eva bared her teeth in a silent grimace. Trying to keep her eyes up and her head down at the same time-a feat that required her to move her hat a little-she walked along the facades of the buildings in time with the shadow. A few times, she bowled over crates, or almost tripped on dogs and small children. It earned her a fair share of cursing-and more vocabulary words. Though she doubted she could share any of these with Agatha.
The shadow darted ahead, forcing her to quicken her pace to keep up. It was like it wanted her to follow.
At once, it vanished, and at the same moment, Eva stumbled onto the edge of a noisy crowd filling the Grassmarket. Eva threw a glance heavenward again and, when she did not see the shadow again, chose to step further into the crush of bodies. Even with her height, she might lose herself, if she was very, very lucky.
There were so many people, all chattering and laughing and making comments using words she'd never heard from Agatha's mouth. As crowded as the tenement had been, at least the unwashed hordes were parceled off into their own rooms and floors. Even the alleyway, crowded and cramped, was somewhat contained. This was like the whole population threatened to swarm her at once.
The language that surrounded her was not the smooth, throaty French Agatha had been teaching her, but the patois of the native Scots and immigrant Irish. These were the first words she had known in her early months-curses, greetings, complaints, songs, names of objects. While those were not comfortable memories, there was something almost pleasant in hearing one's original tongue around her. She did not have to fight to understand, save the odd vocabulary word.
Lively music played on the fringes amid a cacophony of people making up their own melodies to loud, hoarse songs that seemed to be poking fun at something. Someone, she decided, once she listened hard enough through the unfamiliar words. She'd had only limited opportunities to hear music of any kind, so she stood close, loosely swaying her head to the song's rhythm.
A man with a loud voice walked along the edge of the crowd with a tray of drinks, one of which Eva took while his head was turned. After a sip, she quickly regretted her choice; the sour, pungent drink made her choke and tingled unpleasantly down her throat. Maybe it was one of those things that one could grow to like after trying it a few times?
Eva took another, hesitant sip. It was just as bad as the first. She stuck out her tongue. Someone else looked eager for it, and she happily passed it off rather than subject herself to more attempts to drink it.
Part of her wanted to return to Agatha's cramped flat and admit defeat. Part of her wanted simply to vanish. But part of her was seized with an odd, mad desire to whip off her hat, shed her coat, and show her whole monstrous form to the whole city to force an honest reaction from all passersby. There would be those who would scream, those who would try to arrest her on the basis that she'd surely done something wrong … but maybe there would be those who would not panic. Maybe someone would even know who she was, or what had happened to her. Maybe someone would know the source of that shadow. Maybe someone would know Victor.
Eva touched the brim of her hat. She came so close to tearing it off that she lifted it up over her yellow eyes, clenching it tight, before she let go.
It was a passing thought, that's all. She would be safer keeping her head down and hiding. She would not cause her own destruction.
Restlessness drove her forward, past a group that was singing a song even she could tell was bawdy. With her head down and her lips pressed into a line, she blended into the crush with ease. No one grabbed at her, no one accused her of monstrosities or violence.
Hm. Maybe a crowd wasn't such a terrible thing after all. If she could just overcome the smell first.
Eva stood as near the back as was feasible to avoid blocking someone's view of whatever was happening nearer the platform. She was tall enough to see it all for herself without climbing onto carts or chairs or tables, as many of the others did around her. There were even men and women visible on the roofs of the surrounding buildings. Eva gave these a long, hard look, searching for anyone especially tall. If anyone there was of excessive height, it did not show.
A man walked unsteadily up the platform stairs. Another, this one in formal-looking clothes, read from a paper in his thick Scottish accent. Eva could only catch the rolling burr of his words, but no definition from this distance.
What interested her more was the look of this platform, elevated with a long beam suspended over it. Ropes tied in loops dangled from the beam.
Now the man who had come up the stairs spoke. Eva didn't catch his words, so she focused on his hands. They were tied behind his back. A captive of some kind?
She'd heard of prisons and punishment before, reading Blake as she had. Songs of Experience and Proverbs of Hell had much to say about them:
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
Though she still had yet to figure out what a brothel was. Agatha refused to explain that particular word.
She watched the man with the black hood put a sack over the tied man's head. She watched him loop the rope around his neck and position the long coil just so.
She watched, uncomprehending, as he pulled a lever and the floor opened from under the prisoner. He dropped through, jerked to a stop by the length of the rope despite the pull of gravity below. His body, tense in every limb, twitched and writhed—a toy on the end of a string to entertain the roaring crowd.
"Serves the bastard right," muttered a woman beside her, speaking with a lisp due to her missing teeth.
Eva scratched uncomfortably at her sleeves, still watching the man. His jerky movements became less and less frequent. "They'll cut him down now?" Surely his punishment was over now.
This question earned her a strange look. "Nah—he needs to stop dancing first," the woman insisted with a flick of her hand. "Otherwise, how can they be sure he won't get back up again? Can't have that. Can't have someone like that running 'round the city, when he oughta be dancing in hellfire for eternity."
It was only when he stopped moving that Eva realized what had happened, what the woman's metaphors meant.
She'd never seen death, not of humans anyway, but Agatha had had to explain it to her regarding a slaughterhouse and the beheading of chickens. The explanation had forced her to realize what the hard, yellow-white pieces she'd found in the mausoleum were: bones. Human bones, the barest evidence of death.
Even those, startling as the realization had been—once she put together what "death" really meant—had been easy to detach from the actual experience of dying. They were so far removed from the event, after all, and from the complete human form. But now, watching the man stop his thrashing, she could not detach. She had just watched a man die.
And this would be her fate if she were caught. Murdered on display, likely while a crowd shouted. And after…?
"Wh—" Eva had to swallow back the bile in her throat. "What will they do to him? Will he go in the … mausoleum?" The word came out more staccato than usual. "The graveyard?"
"More like he'll go to the university," was her explanation. "Be chopped up for all them students to study."
Eva felt queasy again, and the world tilted around her. She shut her eyes.
"Don't like to think of it myself," assured her fellow spectator, patting her arm. "Nasty business here, and in the world to come. Luckily these buggers deserves it."
They deserved this? This ultimate destruction of body and soul? What could someone do that deserved something so … final?
Surely no one deserved such punishment.
"What did he do?" Eva had to ask.
"Ye daft?" demanded the woman with a good-natured grin. "He's a thief. Stole about two hundred shillings over his lifetime."
Eva felt very glad, suddenly, that she'd dropped the apple she'd lifted when she went out last night and passed on the sour drink to someone else. Would they honestly hang her for something like that? It seemed petty, but she knew well enough of what people might do if they felt they had been wronged. She certainly had enough dents in her skin and memories of old bruises from her earliest days in the city, before she had learned to keep her head down a little better.
The woman gave her one last smile, left. Now that the "fun" was over, the people began to disperse back to their daily tasks. But even with the lingering threat of discovery now that she didn't have the volatile protection of the crowd, Eva found herself rooted to the ground.
Chopped up. Eva nervously rubbed her hands over the scars on her face.
The price of this knowledge felt suddenly too high. She nervously scratched her hair under the brim of her hat and backed away from the Grassmarket.