He asked, “And are you well?”

Once, when Catherine was a child, she’d seen a man in town selling enchanted keys that could open any lock. She remembered how her grandmother had guided her away, telling her magic couldn’t darn stockings or mend holes in the roof and it was best to attend to more practical things. Catherine’s parents quite agreed. So did Catherine herself. Yet here she was, in the city, making use of it. At least it gave people a chance to say goodbye. Even so, her magic was faint and fleeting—she couldn’t bring anyone back to life, after all. There were times she felt she ought to notice the absence of the hours she’d lost bringing back the dead, to be able to root around and find the hollows, like gaps from missing teeth.

She told Spencer, “Perfectly so,” and cast her eyes back down to her work. He tapped his knuckles against the desk and left her to it.

The print floor was soon filled with mechanical clatter, the swish of paper, the squeak of ink rollers. Catherine conveyed the lines on her composing stick to a metal chase. There were blocks of wood, furniture pieces, made to hold the type in place. Once the news was typeset, she’d lock it up tight with a quoin key, before carrying the completed forme over to the press to be inked and printed.

From across the shop, the front door opened, the bell above it chiming as Jonathan Ainsworth stepped inside, a cold gust of city air following in his wake. Catherine set down her composing stick. His gray eyes alighted upon her as he removed his gloves. In his well-tailored day suit, he looked sharp as cut glass. “Follow me, please, Miss Daly.”

Catherine folded her hands in front of her as she shadowed him up the stairs. The Chronicle was once a maze to her, the openness of the print floor at odds with the corridors and locked rooms of the upper floors. The staircase was steep and narrow, lit by gas lamps in brackets along the wall. The second floor was where they took meals, the third made up of rooms for lodging, while the fourth contained the newspaper’s archives, as well as Ainsworth’s office. It was a grand room positioned at the front of the building, with a fireplace and several armchairs, a large window overlooking the street. Through it, omnibuses and private carriages vied for space as they sped along, rattling to and fro on the narrow roads. They crossed the dark, winding stretch of the river by way of North Bridge, to where the copper-clad spires and peaked roofs of finer establishments prevailed.

Ainsworth slipped off his coat, placed it over the chair back, and took a seat behind his lacquered desk. He lived in that moneyed district across the river, and he’d likely one day have a fine monument built for himself in Rose Hill Cemetery. Only during working hours did he venture here, to the soot-black buildings and uneven cobbles of Old Town.