For her thirteenth birthday, her mother had given Stella a compass. It was a beautifully designed one that looked like a brass pocket-watch until you popped up the lid and saw direction instead of time. The brass was etched with a design of Atlas holding up the sky on the top, and an eight-pointed star on the base. Polaris. The north star. The star of the sea.
The star that guided sailors home.
Star of the sea was also, apparently, a title of the virgin Mary, but her mother hadn’t found that out until they met her bibi-daj, when Stella was seven.
Stella was to be the light that guided people to a new home after the world ended. She was named for the destiny her mother had bestowed upon her. A shining light to show people the way.
She was sitting on the roof of the Camden All Saints Church, on the cupola’s ledge, her feet dangling off the edge, her back to the new clock, alternating between looking at her compass and watching the street. A sketchpad sat beside her, a pencil resting atop the blank page she had it open at. Sometimes, when things were overwhelming, she would take her compass and her pad and map parts of the city she didn’t know too well. It helped ground her thoughts when she knew where she was and what was around her.
That hadn’t worked today.
Nothing had worked today. Not screaming, not breathing on the roof, not mapping the city. Not even the possibility of using a hidden alcove on this clearly never visited rooftop to stockpile more tins of food.
Her thoughts kept spiralling out of control and she had to keep grabbing them and forcing them back down, then letting one at a time be allowed out. Metaphorically grabbing them, or psychically, or something. She wasn’t sure exactly what it was she was doing, but somehow she was letting one thought out at a time until they all overwhelmed her again.
Her current thought was about people. She watched them, all the time. She sat on rooftops or in trams or in parks and she watched the people living their lives and she never understood them. She was watching them now, her compass heavy in her hand, the people far below. Not one of them looked up. Not once.
There was a row of Victorian terraced houses right along this street, opposite the church. They’d been turned into bedsits and small flats, and housed railway workers, shop assistants, and clerks. There must have been families, too, because there were children in the street, playing with a ball. Children were easy to understand. They did what they wanted to do.
Adults were difficult. The things they did often weren’t the things they seemed to want to do, or said they wanted to do. They contradicted themselves. They lied. They didn’t even know what they wanted, sometimes, but when they did know, they’d still do something else.
Criminals were a lot like children. They wanted something, they took it. It was strange that she could understand criminals better than regular people.
She wasn’t even sure she liked people. In abstract terms, humans were amazing. They built the most wonderful rooftops, but never used them. They’d invented music! Stella loved music. She supposed it could be argued that birds had created music first, but bird song wasn’t actually a song, it was just whistles, and it had no tune or rhythm. It didn’t count as music. It was merely noise.
She lost her train of thought and more thoughts started bubbling out of her, overwhelming her, like her head was a kettle and her thoughts were steam. No wonder it was called a train of thought.
She slammed the lid back down on the kettle and looked at the compass in her hand. She was born to lead people, to guide, to be the shining light. It was who she was, who she was meant to be, why she existed.
She looked down at the dirty people in the street below, always grifting, always trying to make that extra shilling; grubby little dirty people. They didn’t want a leader. Most of them just wanted another beer.
How could she lead them when she didn’t understand them?
She was tempted to write step one, understand people in her pad, but she had a feeling there’d be fifty steps hidden in that one, and she didn’t have time for a whole staircase right now. Reluctantly, she let that thought go and looked at the next one that slid out.
The Voice. The levels.
She had levelled three times: her birthday, the first time she met and fought Brick, and the night she’d rescued the kidnapped teenagers from the warehouse. Aside from her birthday, she had levelled when she met others with powers.
She’d rescued over one hundred and sixty powered teenagers that night. She’d probably met every teenager with a power in Europe by now. If that was the case, she might never level again.
She really hoped this theory was wrong. Time would tell, and there was nothing she could do either way. Alright, she would just have to wait. In the meantime, she could see what the next thought was.
The brothel.
Her heart lurched. Her breath caught. Her hand tightened around the compass, the brass digging into her flesh. She recognised the sensations; she was preparing for a fight. Her body was psyching itself up without her input. Was it a reaction to having encountered Brick again? He wasn’t here.
“He’s not here,” she whispered.
Her body wasn’t listening. It was ready for an enemy that wouldn’t come.
She closed her eyes. She felt her breaths, lengthened each one as her mother had showed her. Thought only of each breath. Felt the air as it was pulled in over her lips, felt it as it passed down to her lungs. Felt her lungs expand, filling with the breath of life. Held it there.
Identified the scents that came with each breathe. The dusty smell of pigeons, the sharp tang of the bronze bell in the clock tower behind her. The mortar was relatively fresh, the clock a new addition to the steeple. Pigeon poop covered the roof below her in a thick layer, giving off a sour ammonia scent. Someone was cutting timber to the east, which added a pleasant aroma to the smorgasbord of scents. One of the buses in the street was old; she could smell the stink of a diesel engine, which meant it had been manufactured between 1908 and 1915, in between the aetherium wars, in the dead zone when magic and aethertech hadn’t worked.
Held it. Breathed out. Felt the air as it exited her nostrils. Felt her lungs deflate. Held that.
Breathed in. Felt the sun on her face, its warmth caressing her mask, her skin hot beneath it. The hard stone, cold beneath her. Warm where she didn’t block the light. Warm blobs of temperature, below her, spread out. People in the street. Cars. Buses. Horses.
The second hand of the clock face behind her constantly struck her back, unable to move on.
She listened to the sounds around her. Pigeons on the rooftop, cooing softly to one another, fluttering from place to place. She could hear their tiny hearts beat. The distant rumble of a tram on Camden High Street. Voices. Talking, arguing, shouting, crying, singing. Haggling over the price of a piece of chicken. Ordering a cup of tea with three sugars. A husband and wife arguing. A couple fighting or having sex, sometimes those sounded much the same. Children chanting a nursery rhyme. A crying baby, a tired mother trying to hush it.
A distant hammer. A distant bell announcing the…
Sek tos!
Her eyes shot open and she launched herself from the tower as the bell right behind her announced the hour. She hit the flat roof and rolled, her hands going instinctively up to her ears, tears streaming from her eyes.
Tom was a surprisingly good lover. Or maybe it wasn’t that surprising; a private investigator surely needed to be the patient, observant sort. He’d definitely been both. Hildy lay back on his bed, his sweaty sheets pulled up over her chest, a smug smile playing across her mouth. She could taste whiskey, cigarettes, lemon sweets, and Tom. It had been the exact thing she had needed.
“I… um, that… it was good,” Tom stammered.
“Don’t become no blushing violet now, Tommy boy,” she teased him.
“It’s just… I don’t have much. This bedsit, it’s not the kinda place for a woman, you know?”
Hildy frowned, then realised what he was getting at. “Tom, stop, it’s fine. I’m not really monog, you know? I have my career to think of first, and I have my own little place. I don’t get goofy about guys, and I’m not looking for a handcuff or a husband. I merely… wanted to have a little fun. You are fun, this was fun. Let’s not make a parade out of a walk in the park.”
“Oh.” He frowned. “I haven’t really done anything like this before.”
“You are definitely not a virgin, Thomas.”
He smiled, softly. “Only my mother calls me that, and I’m not, no. I was married, before the war. She left me. She married a schoolteacher, but then I became a soldier.”
Her hands flew up to her mouth. “You were a schoolteacher?”
“It feels like a lifetime ago, honestly. I was good at it, too. I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.”
“The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree,” she replied.
His grin deepened. “You know your Shakespeare.”
“Everyone with half a wit knows their Shakespeare.” She reached for her handbag and slid out her cigarette tin.
“By the window, please,” he told her. “Landlord’s rules.”
She slid out of bed, uncaring of her nudity, and carried her tin to the window. She was pulling a cigarette from it when she froze. The tin fell from her hand. The cigarettes scattered and bounced.
She turned and threw herself over the bed, pulling her cardigan on even as she slid across the sheets. Tom was saying something, probably something confused and polite, the dear man, but she didn’t have time for polite confusion. She had a story!
She couldn’t find her drawers, so she pulled her trousers on without them. There was one shoe, she got that on, then hopped around, and finally looked at Tom. He was carefully gathering her scattered cigarettes.
“My shoe?”
“What’s going on?”
“My story! I have a lead. I need my shoe.”
He pointed at it and she was out the door a moment later, second shoe in hand, sprinting for the street. After all, it wasn’t everyday you looked out a window and saw the girl you’d saved from a demon the night before throwing herself off a church tower.
She stopped at the external door from the building’s close long enough to get her other shoe on, then darted across the road and into the church itself. The bell was still ringing. She took a side corridor, searching for roof access. Stairs, there. They led to the second level, where three balconies enveloped the main hall, supported by Greek style columns. One had an iron ladder in a corner that went straight to a hatch that opened onto the roof.
She didn’t stop to think about what she was doing. She just chased her story, like it was her destiny.
Stella lay on the rooftop, staring at the now silent bell tower, blaming it for her having rolled across decades of pigeon shit. At least most of it was hard, but some of it was smeared into her outfit. “This is silk, you know,” she told the tower. “You can’t just clean pigeon poo from silk. Not even with Lux flakes.” With a groan, she climbed to her feet, wondering if her ears were bleeding.
She spun as she heard a dull sound, muted by the constant ringing in her ears, and saw a hatch on the roof rise up. The Land Registry clerk pulled herself through it. Her short hair was messy, and her cardigan was buttoned up wrong. Also, she seemed to have nothing on under it and she wasn’t wearing socks.
This was the woman who had lied about haggling for twenty pounds and mocked Stella for not knowing Jekyll was a fake name. Mocked her in a way she hadn’t even known she was being mocked until her mother had told her. And now this, this bako fulgi was on the same Church roof as her. Sek tos, what did she want?
“WHAT DO YOU WANT?” Stella asked as the clerk came towards her.
The clerk smiled. “I’m a journalist. My name is Hildy Johnson, but everyone calls me Chance. That’s my actual name, by the way, not just something I toss out to get other people in trouble when I get caught breaking into buildings.”
“WHAT?”
“I’m a journalist. My name is Hildy Johnson, but everyone calls me Chance.”
“WHAT? WHY ARE YOU WHISPERING?”
“I THINK THE BELL DEAFENED YOU,” the clerk replied. “MY NAME IS HILDY JOHNSON, BUT EVERYONE CALLS ME CHANCE. I AM A JOURNALIST.”
Stella froze. No wonder she’d been out haggled. No wonder she hadn’t gotten some weird, obscure reference that almost no one would have caught. No wonder she was facing this woman on a roof. Stella might be a hunter, but she was a child playing at hunting compared to Hildy Johnson, who could follow the smell of the shadow of a piece of gossip on the wind halfway across the city.
Hildy Johnson was the best reporter for the London Eye, which was the best newspaper in the city. She was absolutely amazing. Stella read every single one of her articles. She thought they all deserved prizes. Hildy had reported on the assassinations of the tsarina and her daughters in Russia and supposedly had helped Anastasia escape. She’d been at Anastasia’s wedding to Rasputin, then left Russia after the new csarina had died in childbirth, before the assassins finally got the mad tsar. She’d reported on rebellions in the Weimar Republic and Morocco, and been present for two assassinations in Spain. She’d been arrested trying to break into the Vatican in Madrid to get a quote from a bishop about the new pope in what was now the Papal States of America. She had broken out of a Spanish jail!
This was the woman she had met in the Land Registry? This was the woman who had pursued the shadow of a rumour across the city to find her on a rooftop? She was being hunted by the greatest journalist in the world?
Best. Day. Ever!
“I READ ALL YOUR ARTICLES,” Stella admitted, a little shyly.
“THANK YOU. I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR YOU SINCE WE MET AT THE LAND REGISTRY,” Hildy replied.
Stella was in her Battle Outfit, with her mask on. She’d broken into the Land Registry without a mask, in normal clothes. Nothing should have connected the two figures. Hildy Johnson was every bit the genius investigative journalist Stella had imagined her to be. No, she was better. This was amazing! She wanted to hug the reporter for being so good at her job.
“I SAW YOU LAST NIGHT,” Hildy went on. “FIGHTING THAT DEMON. I… IT WAS GOING TO KILL YOU, SO I HIT IT WITH A MILK FLOAT AND THEN STOLE A CAR AND GOT YOU OUT OF THERE. YOU WANTED ME TO TAKE YOU TO CHURCH.”
Sek tos! It was her fault someone knew about the church, and that someone was a genius investigative journalist. Her mother was going to kill her twice. Her bibi-daj would come back home just to kill her a third time.
Bright side, she’d get to see her bibi-daj again, before she died. That would be nice.
“YOUR WOUNDS…” the genius journalist who missed absolutely nothing ever went on. “HOW… A MIRACLE IN AN EAST END CHURCH?”
Aaaaah! Her mother, her bibi-daj, and St. Anne’s verger were going to kill her.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT?” Stella asked.
“BATTLES ACROSS LONDON BROTHELS. FIRES IN MYSTERIOUS WAREHOUSES. FIGHTING DEMONS IN THE STREET. MIRACULOUS HEALINGS IN EASTEND CHURCHES. I WANT TO TELL YOUR STORY. I WANT TO INTERVIEW YOU.”
For the second time in less than ten minutes, Stella Maris threw herself off a roof.
Hildy ran to the edge of the roof, but the young woman was gone, She stood there for a moment, slipping one of her sherbet lemons into her mouth. Her throat hurt, mostly from all the screaming she had just done, and a little from Tom. Sucking the hard-boiled sweet would help.
She turned to head back to the hatch. As she stepped away from the edge, her eyes caught some paper pages fluttering in the slight breeze. When she lifted the pad up, she found the most intricately drawn maps of the city she had ever seen. There were quite beautiful. She slipped the pad under her arm to examine more fully later.
Then she headed to the hatch. She was going to have to face annoyed church officials, but eventually she would get back to Tom, for her cigarettes, the half of her clothes she was missing, and maybe the bank would open again. As long as he didn’t start acting like her father and lecturing her about danger, it might be quite an enjoyable afternoon, after everyone with any authority in the church had finished yelling at her.
Previous Chapter: Chapter Eighteen
Next Chapter: Chapter Twenty
Editor’s Note
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
From: The London Eye Editorial Board
Subject: Language
Date: June 14, 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
Today’s queerguide is about authenticity in historic fiction and the limitations of research.
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