“Done,” he said, unnervingly rapidly. Miriam had a feeling that she’d been had, somehow, but nodded. He strode over to the door and flipped the sign in the window pane to CLOSED. “Now by all means, let me test out this bar. I’ll just take a sample with this scalpel, mind…” He hurried into the back room. A minute later he re-emerged, bearing a glass measuring cylinder full of water into which he dropped the gold bar. Scribbled measurements followed. Finally he nodded. “Oh, most satisfying,” he muttered to himself before looking at her. “Your sample is indeed of acceptable purity,” he said, looking almost surprised. Reaching into an inner pocket he produced a battered wallet, from which he plucked improbably large banknotes. “Nine one-pound notes, milady, the balance in silver and a few coppers. I hope these are to your satisfaction; the bank across the street will happily exchange them, I assure you.” Next he produced a fountain pen and a ledger, and a wax brick and a candle and a metal die. “I shall just make out this promissory note for sixty pounds to you. If you would like to select from my wares, I can work while you equip yourself.”

“Do you have a measuring tape?” she asked.

“Indeed.” He pulled one down from a hook behind the counter. “If you need any alterations making, Missus Borisovitch across the way is a most excellent seamstress, works while you wait. And her daughter is a fine milliner, too.”

Over the next hour, Miriam ransacked the pawnbroker’s shop. The range of clothing hanging in mothballs from rails all the way up to the ceiling, a dizzying twenty feet up, was huge and strange, but she knew what she wanted—anything that wouldn’t look too alien while she realized her liquid assets and found a real dressmaker to equip her for the sort of business she intended to conduct. Which would almost certainly require formal business wear, as high finance and legal work usually did back home. For a miracle, Miriam discovered a matching jacket, blouse, and long skirt that was in good condition and close enough to her size to fit. She changed in Burgeson’s cramped, damp-smelling cellar while he reopened the shop. It took some getting used to the outfit—the jacket was severely tailored, and the blouse had a high stiff collar—but in his dusty mirror she saw someone not unlike the women she’d passed on her way into town.

“Ah.” Burgeson nodded to her. “That is a good choice. It will, however, cost you one pound fourteen and sixpenc.”

“Sure.” Miriam nodded. “Next. I want a history book.”

“A history book.” He looked at her oddly. “Any particular title?”

She smiled thinly. “One covering the past three hundred years, in detail.”