was setting type, working so fast her hands blurred. She felt a tug; she looked down to see that she was wearing a voluminous white satin gown, and one of its flounces was caught up in the machinery of the Wharfedale press. Slowly, inexorably, Fido was being pulled from her desk, dragged nearer and nearer the hungry cylinders of the machine. Then she was in the bowels of the press, rolled quite flat, covered with red-inked words. The strange thing is, what was distressing her in the dream, what made her scream and keep screaming without a sound, was not pain, but the fact that she couldn't read the words.
After ten days in this rented room, she's finding it hard to get out of bed before nine. She speaks to no one, has no business, receives no post. In all her adult life, Fido's never been in such a state of isolation. She feels obscurely guilty about leaving her most responsible clicker, Wilfred Head, in sole charge of the press at such a busy time, not to mention dropping the new Victoria Magazine entirely into Emily Davies's hands—but a sort of helplessness has paralyzed her. Since a few days into what she's come to think of as her confinement, when she went out for air and happened to glimpse a placard advertising Shocking Revelations on First Day of Codrington Trial, she's read no papers, for fear of what she'll find there. Perhaps this is cowardice. Very likely. Fido has suspended all her principles on assuming the name Bennett.
If the trial began on the eighth ... surely it must be over and done with by now? But to find out, she'll have to buy a newspaper, and the thought makes her sick to her stomach.
Her limbs have tightened from lack of exercise. This must be what it feels like to be one of those elegant invalids, cooped up and cosseted all over Mayfair and Belgravia. Fido's afraid to so much as walk in a park because she might run into someone who recognizes her. This city of almost three million souls is smaller than one might think. Accidental meetings happen all the time. (On the last day of August, for instance, on Farringdon Street. Two tangled fates wandered apart for seven years, then converged without warning.)
Fido broods, too, on the original accident, a full decade ago: the day she glimpsed Helen Codrington for the first time, crying by the shore in Kent. Was there a choice, at that moment? Fido could always have walked by, she supposes; pretended not to notice the tears streaking that small, lovely face; said nothing, not even a "May I be of any assistance?" But no, it's simply not in Fido to be so cold, not even nowadays when the world of business has toughened her, and certainly not back then, as a girl of nineteen. So perhaps it's our nature that makes our fate. Inescapable.
And even to save herself from complications, would Fido really want to be the kind of person who walked on past a distraught stranger, fearing to involve herself, averting her face? A dull, utilitarian life that would be. A life without risk.
A tap at the door, and she jumps.
"Miss Bennett?"
"Come in."
"Telegram for you," says the girl, handing it to her.
Alone again, Fido strains to breathe, waits for her pulse to slow. The only person who has her address—for emergencies—is Bridget Mulcahy at the press. Please come at once. B. M.
***
She takes a cab to Bloomsbury, and finds the press in a state of apocalypse. Great Coram Street is littered with hacking, sobbing typos. Miss Jennings, the deaf girl, is standing frozen on a curb, with streaming eyes. "What on earth has happened?" Fido asks another hand, who goes into a coughing fit at the sight of the proprietor. The girl beside her speaks up hoarsely. The word sounds like dying.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Cayenne, I said. Cayenne powder, madam, all over the floor."
The poisonous stuff is not just on the floorboards, Fido finds when she makes her way inside—handkerchief pressed to her face—but in the machines too, scattered among the type itself. What a simple technique, but how effective. Her throat makes a harsh whoop. She catches sight of some red paint daubed on a wall: Something Stinks, it says.
"Have the police been called?" she asks a red-faced Mr. Head.
"Of course," he says shortly.
She coughs and wheezes, then finds her way to her office, where Bridget Mulcahy, face swathed in a scarf