Chapter Text
London, January 1875
Margaret Prior
The night is still. Much too still. The tracks in the snow are barely visible and even less audible. What ear could perceive them, at this hour in the heart of the night, when even in this restless metropolis everything is asleep? Which eye could follow that creeping shadow, which only vaguely resembles a human being? Her footsteps are light, a shaky, floating gait, as if the woman has already been taken from the earth. Everything about her is black, from her shoes to her hair. Only her face, her gaunt face, is as pale as the moon and the falling snow. There is no shine in her eyes anymore. Only blackness, which seems to tell a whole story of grief.
She seems young, almost girlish in her delicate, scrawny figure, and yet so infinitely old in the harshness of her features, like a flower that withered before it could flourish. Not a breath of wind plays with her strands as her childlike hands grasp the icy bridge railing and her boots follow their lead. It is as if the deserted city held its breath before the final act of this tragedy. Only the Thames, restless and turbulent in its dark shallows, murmurs. Calls for her, calls for the woman on the bridge.
For a moment, Margaret sees her own dark gaze reflected in the black waves of the river in the moonlight. Then she lifts her eyes and her desperate gaze glides into the distance beyond the nocturnal horizon, following the currents of the Thames out to sea, where, somewhere, perhaps in Italy, the sun is just rising. And a twitch goes through the stone heart in her chest, which she had thought was frozen. A painful, agonizing twitch. And yet a twitch. A heartbeat in a vacuum that, precisely because of the emptiness of everything else, fills everything.
“Selina,” Margaret whispers through the mask of dried tears, ”Selina.”
One last breath, one last word. And she lets go. Drops, as she believes, the thread of the puppeteer. But even before the water of the Thames fills her lungs, even before she becomes aware of the Reaper, who is waiting for her, Margaret suddenly senses, feels, knows that this is not the end. That she cannot die, cannot let go.
Somewhere, out at sea, on a ship to Florence, a young woman jerks. Jerks from a call that penetrates the veil.
“Selina!”