mercurial shoals of fish to the stony shores of Crete, then into the Ionian Sea, where it is said the body of the son of Dyrrhachus was tossed, after his accidental murder at the hands of Heracles. She came to know the affection of whales, who also sang, though to other ends than her own. She followed pods of spermaceti from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, skirting the northern capes of African deserts, and was delivered, finally, to Gibraltar.
Perhaps it was only a matter of time (and she has no end of time, surely, excepting that one day the world might conclude and she with it) before storm waves and abyssal currents carried her north to the mouth of the Thames, and then west to London. In the year 1891, during the gloaming of Victoria’s England and more than three full centuries after the boyar’s men had shoved her from a bridge in Bucharest, Eõrsebet Soffia raised her head above the stinking, tainted waters of that river befouled by industry and sewage, and gazed sightlessly upon its fetid, teeming banks.
One day, a poet will write: “The river sweats/oil and tar.” But this day, it also sweats her, the boyar’s daughter, the sea’s prostitute. She wends her all-but silent way between the close-packed clipper hulls, and no one notices when she slips from the water and onto the noisome squalor of Saint Katherine’s Docks. Amid the bustle, there in the shadows of the ships and warehouses, who’s to take exception at the spectacle of one more bedraggled doxy? Who will look closely enough to note the scars where her eyes were, or a few barnacles dappling her gaunt cheeks or the backs of her hands? The docks are a riot of “…solid carters and porters; the dapper clerks, carrying pen and book; the Customs’ men moving slowly; the slouching sailors in gaudy holiday clothes; the skipper in shiny black that fits him uneasily, convoying parties of wondering ladies; negroes, Lascars, Portuguese, Frenchmen; grimy firemen, and (shadows in the throng) hungry-looking day-laborers…” Or so Doré and Jerrold described it nineteen years prior to the day of Eõrsebet’s arrival. She moves, barefoot, between baskets and crates, wagons and hogshead casks, “through bales and bundles and grass-bags, over skins and rags and antlers, ores and dye-woods: now through pungent air, and now through a tallowy atmosphere, to the quay…” (once more quoting from the published memoir of Doré and Jerrold’s pilgrimage).
She crosses a narrow canal bridge, which carries her from the docks, away from the anchored fleets and (to steal from the narrative of Doré and Jerrold one last time, I do promise) into “…shabby, slatternly places, by low and poor houses, amid shiftless riverside loungers…on to the eastern dock between Wapping and down Shadwell. Streets of poverty-marked tenements, gaudy public-houses and beer-shops, door-steps packed with lolling, heavy-eyed, half-naked children; low-browed and bare-armed women greasing the walls with their backs, and gossiping the while such gossip as scorches the ears; bullies of every kind walking as masters of the pavement, all sprinkled with drunkenness …”
There is almost in her a regret that the city has not made more of a challenge from this day, her one and only shore leave of the year. There are so many here who can be taken with the smallest bit of effort, the least premeditated and most lackadaisical of seductions, and how few among them would ever be missed? She could easily feast, slaughtering a dozen without any especial effort. She could forget her predator’s instinctual cautions and play the glutton; the hollow created by her plunder would be no more than that made when lifting a single grain of sand from off a dune.
Concealing herself within the stinking gloom of a side lane, she watches and breathes in all the heady, disorienting odors and tastes and sounds of these Citizens of the Crown. Eõrsebet’s senses are assailed, as though she’s come upon a single gigantic organism stranded by the river’s tidal retreat, stranded and rotting, though it is still very much alive; something too concerned with petty squabbles and daydreams and debauchery to even notice how near at hand it is to perishing.
But she’ll take only one. István made of her many sorts of demons, but all are creatures of habit. And habit dictates that only one in London shall die this day by her hand. Habit reminds her that taking more than one might have dire consequences. A mere scrap of the frightened