The route to Blackfriars required crossing London at its seams—those places where one kind of city surrendered to another without ceremony or apology. Casimir walked through the stitching.
From Soho's theatrical pretensions into the honest squalor of Seven Dials, where the streets converged in a seven-pointed star that some antiquarian had once claimed was sacred geometry and everyone else knew was simply bad city planning. He paused at the monument—a sundial that hadn't told accurate time since 1720, as if time itself had given up on this particular intersection.
Seven roads. Seven choices. All of them leading to some version of the same hunger.
You're angry, young man.
The judge's words clung to him like the rain, soaking through his coat into the skin beneath. Angry. As if anger were a failure of character rather than a reasonable response to the mechanical indifference of the world. As if the proper reaction to injustice were a pleasant sonnet about fucking roses.
He chose the southernmost road—the one that led downhill, which felt appropriate.
The streets narrowed. Gas lamps grew sparse, their light rationed like hope in a siege. Here London showed its workings: the night-soil men hauling their fragrant cargo, the rag-and-bone dealers sorting the city's discarded anatomy, the women in doorways offering warmth that had been priced down to its cheapest possible unit.
One of them called out to him. "Penny for your thoughts, love. Tuppence for other considerations."
Casimir touched his hat—a gesture from a world where gestures still pretended to mean something. "My thoughts aren't worth a penny tonight."
"Bad evening?"
"Educational."
She laughed, raspy as coal smoke. "Education's just what the world calls it when it kicks your teeth in polite-like. Come back when you want to forget your lessons."
He walked on. Behind him, she called: "Watch yourself at the crossroads, pretty boy. This hour's when the old things come shopping."
The old things. As if London weren't old enough already—as if beneath the Victorian veneer there weren't older hungers, older bargains, older gods who'd been taking rent in blood and bone since before the Romans taught the Britons how to pave their sacrifices.
At Holborn, the street forked. Left toward the law courts—those temples of procedural justice where truth was whatever could be argued most expensively. Right toward Blackfriars, where the monks had once prayed and the bridge now carried commerce across the Thames's patient throat.
Casimir stood in the fork, rain pooling around his boots.
You're angry.
Yes. He was angry. Angry at Vane for being practically right. Angry at Wainwright for being successfully mediocre. Angry at the judges for valuing uplift over honesty, as if literature's highest calling were to help people feel better about the mechanisms grinding them down.
But more than that—and this was the part that sat in his chest like swallowed glass—he was angry at himself.
For believing sincerity would be enough. For thinking that if he just wrote well enough, truly enough, the world would have no choice but to listen. For being naive enough to imagine that talent mattered more than digestibility, that craft could trump commerce, that anyone cared about poetry except as a kind of cultural garnish to make the dinner party of empire seem civilized.
The city doesn't have citizens—it has symptoms.
His own words, offered with such confidence. Such surgical precision. Such complete misjudgment of the room.
They'd been right to reject him. Not because the poem was bad—it wasn't. But because he'd weaponized it. He'd turned verse into verdict, made the audience his defendants, and then been shocked when they declined to convict themselves.
That's not anger, he thought. That's just honesty without anesthetic. And they're right—it's not art. It's assault.
He chose right. Toward Blackfriars. Toward whatever waited there.
The Fleet Bridge marked another crossing—over the old river they'd buried, the Fleet that now ran in tunnels like a secret beneath the city's feet. Casimir paused midspan, looking down at the grate where water whispered its subterranean confession.
How many rivers had London buried? How many inconvenient truths paved over, built upon, turned into foundations for structures that pretended the depths didn't exist?
I am doing that, he realized. Walking over my own buried rivers. Pretending the anger isn't grief. Pretending the grief isn't fear. Pretending the fear isn't just the knowledge that I might be exactly as good as I think I am and it still won't matter.
A couple passed him, arm in arm, laughing at some private joke. They looked warm. They looked fed. They looked like people who'd never had to choose between bread and paper, between rent and reputation, between eating and meaning something.
He hated them with the pure, clean hatred of someone who knows the hatred is really envy and the envy is really just wanting to be seen as human enough to deserve the same casual happiness.
You're angry, young man.
"Yes," he said aloud to the buried Fleet. "I am angry. And you would be too, if you had any sense left after they paved you."
The river burbled on, indifferent to his solidarity.
At Ludgate Circus, five roads converged in a roundabout that traffic navigated like some dance whose steps no one had bothered to write down. Casimir stood at the edge, watching carriages and carts perform their dangerous ballet.
Another crossing. Another choice.
He could turn back. Go home to his room with its narrow bed and narrower prospects. Sleep off tonight's humiliation. Wake tomorrow and try again—revise the poem, make it palatable, learn to pre-chew his ideas for readers who'd forgotten how to use their teeth.
Become Theodore Wainwright. Successful. Published. Forgettable.
Dead in every way that mattered, but alive in all the ways that paid rent.
Or he could continue. Cross this circus, descend the hill toward the river, find the woman in mourning silk and discover whether her offer was madness or something worse.
Something that might actually work.
A carter shouted at him—he'd drifted into the road without noticing, mesmerized by the wheel-spin and hoof-clatter, the perpetual motion of a city that never stopped moving because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant reckoning with what it had become.
Casimir stepped back. Waited for a gap in the traffic. Crossed.
The decision felt less like choice than surrender—the kind of surrender that's really just exhaustion winning the argument against pride.
Fleet Street stretched before him, lamplight pooling on wet cobbles like spilled champagne. The newspaper offices loomed on either side—the Chronicle, the Telegraph, the Standard—their windows still glowing with the industry of deadline and ink. Inside those buildings, men were choosing what would be true tomorrow. What stories would be told. What version of London would be printed and distributed and accepted as fact.
And none of them would print his poem.
None of them would risk telling their readers that they were symptoms, that the city was eating them, that the whole magnificent machinery of progress was just an elaborate method for turning human beings into something more profitable and less troublesome.
Because that was angry. That was cynical. That was everything literature was supposed to rise above.
Uplift, the judge had said. Hopefulness.
Casimir wanted to go back to that room and ask her: Hopefulness for what? For whom? Hope that the mechanisms will be kinder? That the market will develop a conscience? That if we just believe hard enough in the goodness of the age, the age will stop requiring quite so many corpses to function?
But he didn't go back. He kept walking.
Past the Temple Bar—the old gateway they'd removed, the boundary between the City of London and Westminster, between one kind of law and another. Even in absence, it marked a threshold. Casimir felt it in his bones, that sense of crossing from one jurisdiction into another.
From the London that had rejected him.
Into the London that might accept him on darker terms.
St. Bride's Church rose on his left, its white spire a wedding cake against the dark. They said Christopher Wren had designed it to look like hope ascending. Casimir thought it looked like a threat—all that whiteness, all that certainty, all that vertical ambition stabbing at a heaven that might not be there.
But at least it was honest in its ambition. At least it reached.
When did you become this person? he asked himself. This bitter, this angry, this corrosive?
He knew the answer. It had been gradual, geological—the slow erosion of hope by the rain of rejection. Letter after letter. Reading after reading. The steady accumulation of proof that the world didn't want what he had to offer, or wanted it only if he could make it smaller, softer, more suitable for the parlors of people who'd never been hungry for anything more urgent than novelty.
He'd started out believing in beauty. In truth. In the power of language to reveal and redeem.
Now he believed in accuracy. In the precise calibration of words to wounds. In poetry as diagnosis rather than cure.
And they were right—that was anger.
But what they didn't understand, what they couldn't afford to understand, was that the anger was also love. Love for language, for precision, for the possibility that words could still mean something in a world that had stripped them down to marketing copy and social lubricant.
He loved London enough to be honest about it.
And London repaid that love the way it repaid all love—by ignoring it in favor of more profitable sentiments.
The Thames announced itself before he saw it—that particular smell of river working hard, of water carrying the city's waste toward the sea, of tide and sewage and commerce braided into something that wasn't quite liquid and wasn't quite alive but occupied the space between.
Blackfriars Bridge appeared through the rain like a dream of geometry. Iron arches spanning the Thames's width, gas lamps marching across in disciplined rows, the whole structure a triumph of engineering that said: We have conquered even water. We have made the river negotiable.
Casimir walked onto the bridge.
Halfway across, he stopped.
Below him, the Thames moved with the muscular indifference of something that had been here long before London and would be here long after. The bridge trembled slightly—not from weakness but from the weight of traffic, the constant passage of vehicles and pedestrians treating the river as merely an obstacle between one profitable shore and another.
This was it. The heart of the crossing.
Behind him: the London that had judged him and found him wanting.
Ahead: Blackfriars proper, the old monastery grounds, the place where monks had once prayed for souls and now developers built tenements for bodies.
And somewhere in that darkness, a woman in mourning silk who'd offered him partnership in the business of making words matter.
Casimir looked down at the water. Watched it churn and fold, carrying away the city's refuse, indifferent to the difference between waste and worth.
You're angry, young man.
"I am," he said to the Thames. "I am angry, and I am tired, and I am very, very good at something that doesn't matter. And I don't know which of those is the tragedy."
The river offered no opinion.
A church bell struck—eleven times. One hour until midnight. One hour until he had to decide whether he was the kind of man who kept appointments with witches, or the kind who went home and pretended tonight's humiliation had been character-building.
One hour to stand at the crossroads and choose.
He thought of Simon—young, earnest, devastated by the judges' gentle dismissal of his grief. Too moving. As if there were such a thing. As if making people feel too much were a literary crime.
He thought of Wainwright, collecting his five pounds, his certificate, his validation for saying nothing beautifully.
He thought of the witch's words: There are older currencies than coin. Older measures of worth than popularity.
And he thought: What if she's not mad? What if she's just honest about how things actually work? What if there are ways to make words matter, to give language consequence, and the only price is admitting that the world I've been trying to succeed in was rigged from the start?
The rain intensified, as if the sky had reached a verdict.
Casimir pulled his collar up and continued walking.
Not toward salvation. Not toward damnation.
Just toward the next crossing, the next choice, the next threshold between who he'd been and who he might become.
The bridge deposited him on the southern bank, where London turned industrial and honest—warehouses, wharves, the smell of tanning and brewing and all the trades that the northern bank preferred not to see but couldn't function without.
The monastery grounds were easy to find—a small park, a few ruins, and at the center, the remains of a chapel whose roof had been open to the sky since Henry's dissolution.
She was waiting.
Standing in the roofless nave, rain falling around her like a curtain, her mourning veil drawn back.
In the gaslight from the street, her face held that same necessary geometry—sharp-boned, pale, inevitable.
"Casimir Grey," she said. Not a question. "Right on time."
He stood at the threshold of the ruined chapel, rain streaming down his face.
"You were right," he said. "I lost."
"I'm always right about failures." She smiled. "It's successes I find boring. They're all the same—someone learned to compromise at exactly the right moment. But failures..." She gestured for him to enter. "Failures are unique. Each one breaks in its own way."
Casimir crossed the threshold.
The rain followed him in.
And somewhere in the distance, another bell began to strike toward midnight.