Norma Mackenzie blew three times on her pie, then bit it. It was still too damn hot, but she was starving. This had been a long day, and she still had two more hours before she could close up her stall and head home. Her feet hurt, her back hurt, her damn brain hurt. Her heart hurt, thinking of Little Norma, her namesake, her granddaughter, needing medicine they couldn’t afford.

London was pain. Sometimes, she regretted coming here from Glasgow all those years ago. But if she hadn’t, she’d never have met Willy, God rest his soul. Never have had six kids, fourteen grandkids. London was family.

London was a bloody pain in the ass.

She reminded herself to smile and not scowl, and took another bite of her pie. Still had a few more hours, she could make a few more coins, surely. They might be able to get Little Norma medicine in a day or two.

Maybe she shouldn’t have bought the pie, but it hadn’t cost that much and she couldn’t help her grandbaby if she were starving or dead.

She swallowed, and started shouting at the market crowd. “Come git your flowers here, flowers here. Come git pretty flowers for a pretty lady. Happy flowers for a wedding, sad flowers for a funeral. Come git bonnie flowers for a lover. Come git your flowers here, flowers here.”

An absolutely giant young woman in a turquoise shirtwaist and skirt, with a pretty hat and blonde hair, suddenly appeared before the stall. “Hello,” the girl said, her voice betraying her youth. “I am looking to buy flowers.”

“Then yer at the right place, hen,” Norma replied. “I’ve got every kind of flower here.”

The girl nodded. “I heard you mention happy flowers and sad flowers, so you know?”

Norma almost asked know what, but an important lesson every merchant learned was to always seem like you knew. “I might know,” she hedged.

“Right.” The girl nodded enthusiastically. “Because it’s a secret, and we’re not in Florence, obviously, we’re in London, and I’m not supposed to know, but it was in a book I found in an old market stall, and I didn’t know what I was reading until I read it, and then I memorised it because it seemed useful, though it’s been eight months, and this will be the first time I’ve used it.”

Norma blinked. What the damn carnations was that all about? How was she supposed to respond… no, that question, at least, was obvious by the girl’s tone. She might have an accent that could cut glass, like she’d just come down from one of the noble’s mansions, but she sounded exactly like Norma’s granddaughters when they thought they were about to be scolded. And her middle-daughter, come to think of it, who really ought to know better at thirty-five. “I won’t tell anyone, hen,” she promised.

“Oh, thank you. Alright, I need purple hyacinths to say that I’m sorry, and do you have flame lilies? I read about them in a book, too. No, alright, red tulips for the fire, I suppose, and myrtle, which is a double because it means both duty and bloodless victory… that’s sorry about the fire but it ended in victory without any bloodshed, so I was actually right… what’s next? Dandelion for overcoming hardship? No, that’s not right… it’s repetition… there’s no flower that means I’ll do it again if I have to… wait, no, of course, amaranth. It’s perfect; well, it isn’t, but immortality is the closest we can get to repetition. Then edelweiss for courage and devotion, of course, and snowdrops because I want to fix things. Can I have those please?”

Norma just stared at the tall girl. “What did you do?”

“Something I maybe shouldn’t have, but I was right, and it worked, and I’d do it again, but I’m still in trouble, but this will fix things. It will fix things.”

Norma started building the bouquet the girl had mentioned. Six different kinds of flowers were quite a lot. People usually only bought one or two varieties, but the bouquet looked rather fetching as it came together.

“I am truly sorry about learning your secret language,” the girl said. “I know you need it for your spying and things, and I shouldn’t know about it.” Norma froze in the midst of making the bouquet, the words tangling up in her brain. The girl thought there was a secret florist language? Norma thought of the descriptions she had been given. The girl thought flower symbology was a secret florist language? What absolute nonsense had people been filling this poor child’s head with?

If Norma told her there was no such language, she wouldn’t believe it anyway, because of course people with a secret language denied they had one. She could help the child out though. “You best not ever tell anyone, anyone at all, about the secret language of the florists, hen,” she said, saving the child from at least some embarrassment.

“I won’t, I promise.”

“Now, you’ve got six varieties of flowers here, and some are difficult for me to come by, so…”

The girl was holding out a five pound note.

“That’s far too much money, hen,” Norma said, kicking herself mentally. That would buy all the medicine Little Norma ever needed. “I can’t make change.”

“Oh, no,” the girl replied, “I’m paying extra so you won’t tell anyone I was here. I know I’m not supposed to know the secret language of the florist-spies, and this is so you won’t tell people that I do. Is that alright?”

“I’ll take it to my grave,” Norma promised, and meant it. Who would ever believe her anyway?

As Stella walked, she slowly changed the colours of her clothing. She did it so subtly no one would notice if they were watching her, and no one was watching her. Fleet Street wasn’t busy, but there were a lot of men on it, heading into work on journalistic night shifts.

Fleet Street was where all the newspapers came from. She’d once sneaked into the home of the London Eye to watch the huge printing presses in the basement churn out thousands of the next day’s edition. It had been fun, but she’d expected more security. There was just one old, slow guard who’d never even noticed she was there.

The newspaper buildings around her made Stella wonder what tomorrow’s headline would be. Spain, today, and they almost never had the same headline subject two days in a row. Maybe it wouldn’t even be European news, maybe something had happened in Asia or The Americas. But if she had to say something, and by the rules of the paper prediction game she had to, then she would bet on Austria for tomorrow.

Probably that barons fault.

Even if it wasn’t, blaming the aristocracy was what people did.

By the time she’d reached the end of Fleet Street, her clothing was light blue. By the time she reached Lincoln Inn’s Field, the light blue had deepened to dark blue, and the dark blue was now tinting towards black.

Her stockpile was in Soho, but it was nowhere close to where she stood now, under the shade of a tree watching a building. It was made of red brick and stood four storeys high, with a visible attic and basement. The wings on either end were higher, as was the central tower. The Land Registry Office was home to deeds and documents that detailed who owned what, filed away in hundreds of cabinets across dozens of rooms.

They had to have a system, right?

By this point in the evening, the staff would have left, the building would be empty, and she could find out who owned the warehouse that had burnt down, and what else they owned.

It was going to take days to go through a building this size.

“This investigating business is rather disagreeable,” Stella muttered.

She moved to the alley on the western side. Someone had left a window open on the second floor. Her shirtwaist disassembled around her, forming into two tentacles that pulled her up to the window, and she slid through into the dark room beyond. It appeared to be an office. She took a quick glance around but found nothing that helped her. No handy organisational chart that told her where to look.

Stella pulled her tentacles back into her clothes, reforming the shirtwaist, before leaving the room.

She only managed three steps along the hallway outside before a voice stopped her. “You, there. I say, what are you doing here in the middle of the night?”

Stella froze, then turned to the young woman behind her. She was in her mid-twenties, at least twenty-five, with ink smudged along one cheek, practically identifying her as a clerk. She had short cropped dark hair and wore brown trousers, a very cute pair of shiny black shoes with a short heel, and a wool cardigan over a cream blouse. The cardigan was green at the bottom, blue at the top, and had white patches on both colours that Stella thought were supposed to be sheep and clouds.

“I’m a journalist,” Stella lied. “I’m investigating the warehouse fire in Limehouse. No one has yet succeeded in locating the owner for a statement.”

The clerk looked suspicious. “What’s your name?”

“Hildy Johnson.” That was the name of a real journalist, if the clerk decided to check. She wrote some of the best articles in the London Eye, in Stella’s opinion.

“Hildy is a man’s name. Hildebrand.”

“Or Hilda, or Hildegard.” Stella considered the situation, then added. “There’s five pounds in it for you, should you assist me in finding what I seek.”

“You broke into the building,” the clerk hissed, which was impressive with a sentence that included zero esses. Eleni could take lessons.

“There was no breaking involved,” Stella replied, indicating the door to the room she had come in by. “The window was open.”

“We’re on the second floor!”

“Ten pounds!”

“You brought a bouquet of flowers on a break-in?”

“Yes, that was regrettable, but there were timing issues. What if I offer you fifteen pounds?”

“I should call the police,” the clerk stated confidently, as if Stella would ever allow that to happen.

Stella rolled her eyes. “Try. I can leave you bound and gagged in the basement, or you can accept twenty pounds for helping me.”

The clerk frowned. “Has no one ever taught you to haggle? The number is supposed to go down.”

“Eighteen pounds,” Stella said immediately, rectifying the issue. No one had ever taught her to haggle, but this was quite fun.

“Too late, I accepted twenty,” the clerk said, rebuffing the lower offer.

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did.”

Stella sighed. The haggling was less fun now it was becoming an argument, so she gave in to the lying clerk who absolutely hadn’t accepted the higher offer. “Fine, just help me find the file I need, will you?”

The clerk indicated the room she had just left. “It’s in here.” She walked in. After a moment, Stella followed. The file was on the desk. She eyed it warily. “Another journalist was having a look,” the clerk said. “I haven’t put it away yet.”

Stella moved over to the desk, her eyes flicking over the text even as she kept the clerk in her peripheral vision.

The warehouse was registered to a Doctor Henry Jekyll. “I wonder what he is a doctor of,” she mused.

“Are you a good journalist?” the clerk asked suddenly. “Well read? Knowledgeable about modern culture?”

“Yes, quite,” Stella said absently, distracted by the file. After a moment she remembered she was undercover and turned to the clerk. “I’m rather exceptional, actually. Do peruse my articles in the London Eye.”

“I’ll do that. Your doctor has three other properties in London.” She indicated the other files on the desk. Stella quickly looked them over. A factory, a private medical clinic, and a townhouse. “Perhaps he is Hyde-ing in one of them.”

Finally, a clue. “Yes, he might be hiding,” Stella replied as she wrote down the addresses of all three, then set two five-pound notes and ten gold sovereigns on the desk. “You were very helpful, well done.” She moved across the hall, into the other room, and was out of the window before the clerk could react.

She would need to go raid her Soho stockpile next, the ones in the Eastend wouldn’t feed all the teenagers for long, but Stella had a much more pressing concern. She had promised the old lady in the market she wouldn’t tell anyone about the secret language of the florist-spies, but that meant her bibi-daj would see the Flowers of Forgiveness as nothing more than pretty flowers.

She’d never understand the apology Stella had so carefully crafted.

Stella was doomed.

The woman pretending to be a clerk put the files back where she had found them. It wouldn’t do for the real Land Registry staff to turn up at the crack and find them all askiff. Better for them to think no one was ever here than for them to realise they had been broken into twice in one night, and both times over the same file.

Besides, she had a feeling they would find her a lot more easily than they would locate the mysterious young billboard who had left her with a purse full of hush money and a hundred burning questions.

Who was the flap? How was she connected to the Oak Lane fire? Did she always blouse out second storey windows as easy as walking through doorways? Why did she look so spiffy breaking into a government building? Did she realise how much money twenty pounds was? Did she always give out six months’ worth of rent as if it was pocket change? Why didn’t she recognise that Henry Jekyll was an obviously fake name? Why did she have a bouquet of flowers for a break-in? Why was she so flukey?

Most interestingly, she had pretended to be Hildy “Lucky Chance” Johnson.. The hotshot journalist was a rising star at the London Eye: gorgeous, funny, talented, and young. It was interesting that she had known Hildy was female, most assumed the journalist to be male; even her employers had made that mistake at first, when she was sending correspondence in from the Continent during the Second Aetherium War.

Hildy decided she should be flattered by the imitation. Flattered and twenty pounds richer. There was a story here, and it was tied up with the warehouse fire and the obviously fake name of the man who owned it.

Hildy’s smile widened.

She always got the scoop.

Previous Chapter: Chapter Nine

Next Chapter: Chapter Eleven

Editor’s Note

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

From: The London Eye Editorial Board

Subject: Language

Date: June 12, 1922

Confused? You might need The Hildy Johnson Flapper Slang Dictionary. It explains all the flapper slang in this, and other, chapters.

Author’s Note

First, apologies for the slight spoiler in the editor note. Oops, spoiler, Hildy will be back, I guess.

There’s a context post on writing satire on the queerguide today.

Also, little Norma got her medicine. She’s fine. Don’t worry.

Leave a comment in flapper slang if you can.