BLACK HARBOR, alfie solomons

One

November 1918.

London held its breath like a city waiting to wake from a bad dream.

The war wasn't over, not officially, but the air had suddenly changed. You could feel it in the way the factories exhaled smoke into the low grey sky. In the way women lingered half a second longer outside post offices. In the way the newspapers sold faster than straight, out of the oven, steamy bread.

Something was coming home. Something with boots and ghosts. 

•

The print ink stained Helena's fingertips before she even finished the headline. ARMISTICE IMMINENT, it read in thick, shouting letters. She didn't react at first. Her office on Camden High Street sat above the morning noise: carts rattling over wet cobblestones, a vendor calling yesterday's prices, the distant clang of metal from the railway yards. Men screaming over the loud creaking and slams of wooden boxes by the docks. Ordinary sounds. Safe sounds. 

Helena folded the newspaper once. Precise. Her brother's last letter sat open on the desk beside her. The ghost of the war brushed over her, light as a draft, cold enough to raise goosebumps across her skin. Three weeks old. Too awfully quiet. Her eyes moved back to the article, slower this time, more careful, like the words might shift if she looked too quickly, as if her thoughts threatened to break free like a dam if she dared allow them. Troop returns expected. Not today, but soon. 

Helena leaned back in her chair, the dark brown leather creaking softly beneath her weight. Outside, somewhere far down the street, church bells began to ring; the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. The sound was not in celebration, not yet. It was more like a warning, looming over London. Her jaw tightened. If the soldiers were coming home...

London was about to change its face.

The knock came hard enough to rattle the glass in the window.

Helena stilled for a moment, not startled, for she didn't startle easily, but the newspaper lowered a careful inch in her hands, as if she were setting something fragile back onto the world. Perhaps it was the thing she couldn't face right now: relief, grief, hope, dread. The collision of emotions was spurring deep inside of her. 

"Miss Almington," the voice called through the door, clipped with the characteristic dockside urgency she had grown so used to after these last four years. "We're ready for you at the docks. The dockers are waiting."

For a moment, she didn't answer. Instead, her gaze rested on the headline again; she wasn't reading it now, just... just holding it. Three weeks without a word. Three weeks of silence stretched thin as wire across her ribs. Those feelings, lurking just beneath the surface, she had learned, were a dangerous indulgence. She didn't dare reach for them.
Instead, Helena folded the newspaper with slow, deliberate grace, smoothing the crease with her thumb. Ink marked her skin faintly, she noticed, and she brushed it away with the edge of her handkerchief, in precise motions, her thoughts being wiped off along with the ink.

"Give me a minute," she said at last.

Her voice was calm, warm, but it carried the quiet authority of someone long accustomed to being obeyed without question.

The office now carried the soft imprint of her long presence there: the faint scent of rosewater and bergamot, the careful order of papers, the fresh spring of lavender resting beside the ledger. Nothing excessive. Nothing careless. But some other scents were also floating around her... the smell of whisky and tobacco, almost gone now, but not quite. She secretly hoped it would never really go away, that they would forever stay ingrained in her father's old office furniture, in leather and wood. That way, he would forever stay as well, somehow.