By spring 1919, London had not healed. It had simply learned to move while still wounded. The Influenza had taken what war had left behind. Its invisible force was quick and quiet, moving without ceremony. Black crepe still hung in too many windows. Funeral carts still rolled at hours respectable people preferred not to notice. The usual grand theatre of a London funeral was no longer. No longer the slow processions of plumed horses and weeping neighbors. There was only the hollow, frantic "clip-clop" of over-worked horses to be heard now, echoing through Camden's alleys. They were muffled by the damp slush of the streets, and their hurried symphony telling the tale of the drivers who were trying to outrun the very air they breathed. There was no time for the ritual of the wake, only the swift, silent scrape of wood against stone. They moved against the gray hours of the dawn, carrying plain pine boxes in a desperate move to clear the way for the next tide of the dead. Grief had become a private, hushed affair, stripped of its dignity by the sheer weight of the numbers.
But it was there, all around town... all taken over by a wave of dark. The yellow fog of Camden didn't just hang in the air; it felt like a damp, woollen mourning veil draped over the entire borough, and... there was an eerie lack of sound, save for the occasional rhythmic tolling of a church bell marking another soul lost to the "Spanish Lady".
And yet, the docks were stirring again. Winches groaned back to life. Chains dragging like the sounds of souls asking for help. Ledgers reopened. Because London, if nothing else, was stubborn about survival.
Solomons Bakery - After hours.
The bakery smelled wrong for the hour. The ghosts of the morning bake still lingered in the air: warm yeast and toasted crust... but beneath it now crept something else... something sharper. It was the stinging bite of raw spirits and the cloying heavy scent of molasses. It was the smell of something being born in barrels rather than ovens, a secret bubbling in the heat where the sourdough should have been.
Alfie Solomons stood at the long worktable, sleeves rolled high, waistcoat strained slightly across his middle. The yellow fog pressed against the glass of the windowpanes, straining the morning light until it was the color of a bruise, casting a jaundiced glow over the contents sat before him: three equal glass bottles. Their contents a murky amber still settling from the last run. Experimental. Not yet ready for polite company; not that Camden had much "polite company" left after the war and the wave of dark. He tapped a fingernail against the glass, and a sharp, lonely clink that seemed to echo too long took over the empty shop.
Behind him, Isaac Rosen waited with the careful stillness of a man who had learned patience the expensive way.
"Dock traffic's picking up," Ike said.
"Yeah, well... plague's done thinning the herd, ain't it?"
He uttered. He wasn't cruel, just factual. In his London arithmetic.
Ike cleared his throat lightly, trying to get rid of the bitter taste rising.
"There's a merchant firm you might look at. Almington Trading. Been runnin' steady through the war... and the influenza."
Now that... that made Alfie's eyes lift. Because surviving one disaster was business. Surviving two was... interesting.
"Go on," he said quietly.
Ike stepped closer to the table. "Clean manifest. Tight routes. Continental access still intact. Antwerp. Rotterdam. Some channel movement."
Useful ports. Very useful. Alfie picked up one of the rum bottles, tilting it toward the low light. The amber caught the dire briefly in the flame's reflection.
"A woman," Ike said. Alfie could hear the underlying amusement in his voice. No... it was more than that. Was it respect he was hearing now?
A beat. "She kept the contracts when most firms folded. Paid dockers even during the fever months."
That made Alfie very still. If there was one thing he knew for certain, it was that men remembered who paid them when the carts were carrying bodies.
"Men loyal?" he asked softly
"From what we hear... yeah. They listen when she speaks."
A slow breath moved through Alfie's nose. Then, the faintest ghost of a smile. "Well," he murmured. "That's something, innit."
His gaze dropped back to the bottle in his hands. Rum needed ships. Ships needed routes. And those... well, routes needed someone respectable enough to keep the coppers bored. And, apparently, somewhere across Camden, Miss Almington was very good at keeping things running while the world was busy dying.
Alfie rolled the bottle slowly between his palms, his eyes focused now. Building the shape of her from numbers and scraps of reports. She paid her dockers, kept continental routes open, and didn't golf when better men had. His thumb tapped slowly and continuously against the glass. She is not careless, then. He thought. She's not soft in the ways that mattered... but a woman still. Well, that fact alone meaning London would be underestimating her already. The corner of his mouth twitched. That, more than anything, made her valuable, useful. Or dangerous. In this life, usually both. He set the bottle down with finality.
"Keep watching her routes," he said mildly, though his eyes had gone sharp again, "and Ike -" A small pause followed. When his voice came, it was measured. "...find out what she does when someone tells her no."
That, Alfie Solomons knew better than most, was where the truth of a person really lived.
Almington Trading — Public Face
To the outside world, Helena Almington was doing very well. That was the story. The ledgers balanced. Ships still docked under her contracts. Men still tipped their caps when she crossed the yard.
Inside the infirmary room, where she had quietly set up in the back warehouse, the story looked different. The only sound was the wet, ragged struggle of a man's lungs. Helena didn't flinch. She had learned to count the seconds between breaths the way she counted the crates on her dock: with a cold, necessary precision.
"Easy... easy now," Helena murmured.
One of the younger dockhands lay sweating under wool blankets, breath too fast, skin too hot. The influenza had not finished its work in Camden yet. Dr. Whitcombe shook his head slightly.
"Another day will tell us."
Helena inclined her head once in her usual stance, calm and composed.
Only when the doctor turned away did her fingers tighten briefly in the fabric of her gloves. Three men lost already. Two more out sick. And now...
Her brother coming home into the middle of all of this.
It was clear to her: not all losses came from fever.
"Bennett," Helena called quietly.
He stepped closer at once. "We're tightening dock priority," she continued. Her voice still soft now carrying clean across the small infirmary room. "Our contracted ships load first. No exceptions without my review."
Bennett's brows pulled slightly.
"That will upset a few of the newer wholesalers."
Helena adjusted the fallen edge of the wool blanket over the sick dock hand. "Then they may come speak with me."
Benny's eyes held respect for his boss's way, there was no heat and no apologies with her, just decision.
Outside, the cranes at Camden Docks shifted into a different rhythm.
By early June of 1919, Camden no longer felt merely tired. It felt crowded in the wrong places. Helena noticed it first in the margins, not in the ledgers; for those still balanced her usual precision, but in the spaces between movements. Too many men were now lingering near the hiring boards. Too many caps pulled low over pale faces that had seen France and come back unfinished. Silver War Badges flashed dull and small on worn-out lapels when the light caught them just right. There weren't many, but there were more than there had been before. And increasing by each day.
She stood at the warehouse window one morning, her gloves folded neatly in her hands, watching the yard below with that same composed stillness her men long since learned to respect. She observed as two men argued near the loading ramp. It was nothing dramatic, nor loud enough to draw formal attention, but the edge was there.
"Too many hands," Bennett murmured behind her. "Not enough work."
Helena didn't turn. "Yes," she simply answered. She could already feel what would come next.
The docks, meanwhile, had begun to misbehave. Ships arrived a half-day early, or late, or with manifests that required... clarification. Customs inspections, once irritantingly predictable, had grown inconsistent; some cargo waved through with barely a glance, others held for reasons that never quite repeated the same way twice. Helena didn't like patterns she couldn't map.
By mid-June, three separate shipments required amendment. By the fourth, she stopped believing in coincidence. She knew something, or better yet, someone was behind it. Inside Almington Trading, the public face remained immaculate. The invoices were stamped, and the contracts honored. Caps tipped when she crossed the yard. But in the infirmary room behind the warehouse, the world told a truer story.
"One more off the morning shift," Dr.Whitcombe said quietly one afternoon.
Helena inclined her head once. "Influenza?"
It took all her strength not to scream, cursing at the winds. So many men lost, two still recovering, and now the labor pool shifting beneath her feet. And the men coming back... those were not the same who had left for the war. She felt completely invaded by this bitter feeling burning her insides, while London stubbornly kept moving anyway.
Across Camden, someone else was also paying attention.
The bakery had too much movement for bread alone.
Inside, flour dust hung thick in the warm air, catching the yellow gaslight in slow, drifting clouds. The ovens had gone banked low for the night, yet the place was far from asleep. Crates sat stacked where no honest bakery required crates. Ledgers lay open on Alfie Solomon's scarred wooden table, ink still dying in sharp, impatient strokes.
Alfie stood very still behind it, analysing patterns, while Ollie hovered nearby, trying very hard to look like he wasn't watching his employer think.
"They're queuing for work down by the south berth," Ollie said carefully.
"Course they are," Alfie's eyes did not lift as he murmured almost absent-mindedly. The corner of his mouth pulled, thoughtful. The war spat men back out unevenly, and to him, it made those men very interesting markets. His thick fingers tapped once against the paper in front of him - a shipping note bearing one very neat, very controlled name: Almington Trading. Alfie finally looked up slowly. His blue eyes were dark with quiet calculation. "Well now," he said softly to the empty air. "City's starting to breathe again..." he paused for a moment, kindness far from his voice by now. "...just not very orderly." And somewhere across Camden, though she did not yet know precisely why, Helena Almington had begun listening too.
It arrived just past noon. The telegram read in big block letters: A. SOLOMONS. Helena read it carefully. Bennett stood nearby.
"What do we know about him?" she asked.
He exhaled slowly. "Bakery owner on paper. Expanding wholesale. Protection services beginning to circulate his name."
Helena's gaze drifted briefly to the window. Fog sat low over Camden.
Underneath the city, something was beginning to hum.
"And the war?" she asked quietly.
Benny hesitated. "Silver War Badge. Discharged early."
Helena folded the telegram with slow precision.
"Mm," she said softly. The name had already crossed her desk once that week, to which she felt mildly annoyed. Now it had returned. Now she was listening.
When the call finally connected, the line crackled faintly.
Ollie's voice came first. "Mr. Solomons' office asking for Miss Almington, please."
Benny began smoothly asking them to wait a moment. But the voice that eventually answered from Helena's end was male. Not hers. Not soft. Not steady either, if one listened closely enough.
"This is Sebastian Almington speaking."
Not a Private. Just a man trying very hard to sound like one.
Across Camden, Alfie's eyes sharpened immediately.
There it was, the hesitation buried under the authority. Shell shock wore many coats. Alfie knew the cut of this one.
"Right," Alfie said mildly. Almost pleasant. "Pleasure, Mr. Almington."
But his gaze had already gone distant, thinking; now the board looked different.
The door to Helena's office didn't just open; it yielded, as if giving way under the sheer atmospheric pressure of the man behind it.
Alfie Solomons stepped inside without waiting to be announced, his heavy boots landing with slow, deliberate certainty; he had a slight waddle to his hip, his steps struck the floorboards with the finality of a gavel. He came three paces in and stopped, his large frame instantly shrinking the room. His gaze swept the space, taking it all in: the smell of expensive ink, the high-masted ledgers, and the singular, flickering candle that fought against the dying jaundiced light of the Camden evening; his eyebrows pulled faintly at that. Then, his eyes found her.
Helena Almington did not rise. She didn't even shift. She sat behind her desk, hands folded neatly atop a blotter, her spine a straight line of uncompromising discipline. She was the only thing in Camden that looked entirely untouched by the wave of dark.
In the corner, slouched but far from absent, sat the man Alfie took to be Sebastian Almington. He was a soldier returned. His hands were buried deep in his coat pocket to hide the tremors, but his jaw was tight. His eyes, though shadowed, tracked every inch of Alfie's movement with the brittle alertness of a man who had learned the hard way that danger rarely knocked twice.
Alfie's gaze flickered to the brother for a microsecond, like a predator's check for a threat, and in that short time, he could see their resemblance. He could also see the terrors lurking beneath the surface, for he recognized them as well as looking into the mirror. He moved his eyes back at Helena, and this time, he truly looked.
The reports had failed to mention the gravity of her. It wasn't just the face; it was the stillness. Anything that could hold the center of a room that quietly, Alfie realized, was never just decoration.
"Well," Alfie said. His voice was low, like a rough velvet, a vibration that seemed to hum in the very floorboards between them. He let the silence stretch, his eyes sharp as broken glass, raking over her with a terrifyingly slow intensity.
"Now... this," he murmured, the word curling like smoke. "This is interesting, innit?"
Helena didn't blink. Most men mistook her stillness for softness. He was about to learn better. She met his gaze with a cool, piercing stare that didn't flinch at his proximity. The air between them grew thick, charged with the kind of static that precedes a lightning strike.
"Mr. Solomons," she said. Her voice was the perfect counterpoint to his; it was clear, melodic, and cool as a running winter stream. "You've spent the better part of four weeks watching my ships. I assumed you'd eventually tire of the view from the docks and come in to see the books."
Alfie felt a sharp, unexpected spark of genuine amusement. There it was, he observed: no tremor to her voice nor her stance, no heat, just absolute quiet accuracy.
Unhurriedly, he stepped closer, leaning one large hand on the edge of her desk. He didn't crowd her; he claimed the space. He could smell her now, not the sickness of the streets, but something clean, like lavender and old paper.
"I'll be straight with you, Miss Almington," he said, his head tilting slightly, his thumb tracing the wood of her desk. "I ain't watchin' your books. Those are of no interest to me, you see..."
He leaned in, his shadow falling over her, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial rasp. His eyes held hers.
A beat settled into the room. Helena felt something heavy in the air, and she forced herself to stay composed, as if the lack of oxygen meant nothing to her, as if she were above it. It wasn't flirtation, she could tell. And not quite a threat either. She couldn't properly name what it was... maybe intrigue.
In the corner, Sebastian shifted forward slightly in his chair. Helena's spine was brushed by the cold tension, and she made sure her fingers remained loosely folded, though her attention sharpened a fraction.
"And what," she asked calmly, seemingly unbothered, "have you concluded?"
Alfie's thumb tapped once against the wood of her desk. He seemed thoughtful.
"That you're keepin' lanes open most firms couldn't manage with twice the men," he stated.
"That you paid your dockers when half of Camden was too busy buryin' theirs. That you... a woman, keeps the Rotterdam line open while better men are busy choking on their own lungs..." He paused, his gaze sharpened. She kept her expression calm and observant. She noted his gaze dropping to her mouth for a fraction of a second before locking back onto her eyes.
"That isn't a ledger entry. That's a miracle, that is..." The air tightened.
"That tells me two things..." he stopped for a moment. Helena patiently waiting, her eyes showing him that she didn't feel intimidated by his presence in the least.
"You're either very well protected..." his eye brows shot up. The Almingtons picking up the underlying connotation.
"...or very well organized." his eyes narrowed in mock disbelief.
"And which have you decided I am, Mr. Solomons?" she asked patiently.
He didn't answer. Instead, the corner of his mouth twitched with the ghost of a smile that didn't reach his predatory eyes.
Helena tilted her head back just an inch, a gesture that was less of a retreat and more of a challenge. She didn't let the heat of his proximity break her composure.
In the corner, Sebastian let out a small, sharp breath. A stifled sound of distress. Helena's eyes didn't leave Alfie's, but she could see out of the corner of her eyes how his head finally shot up to look at Mr. Solomons. Her fingers tightened almost imperceptibly on the desk.
For the first time, Sebastian spoke.
"We don't need anyone's protection. We manage our own affairs, Mr. Solomons." His voice was rough but steady enough to carry.
Alfie's eyes slid toward him again and stayed there longer this time. Then, unexpectedly, Alfie gave the faintest nod. It was such an odd gesture; it didn't read as respect, more like some sort of acknowledgment.
Then, his gaze lazily shifted back to Helena as he said, "Looks like you do."
His focus narrowing again.
"Truth is," Alfie went on, his tone easing into something almost conversational, "I wasn't lookin' to cause you grief down at Legal Quays."
Helena's gaze did not soften. "No?"
A ghost of a smile pulled at one corner of Alfie's mouth. "Nah." He leaned back slightly... just enough to release some of the pressure in the room.
"I was tryin' to get your attention."
There it was. Honest in the way dangerous men sometimes were.
Silence stretched between them, but it had changed shape now. Helena tilted her head a fraction.
"Good," Alfie murmured. His expression read satisfied, as if it said, "Now we can talk." His fingers drummed once more against the desk before going still, and he finally sat down on the chair across from Helena. She could look at him now, eye to eye.
"I'm expandin'," he said plainly. "Got goods startin' to move that'll need respectable lanes. Clean manifests. Continental discretion."
His eyes steady, assessing her.
"And from what I hear..." He breathed, "...your hands are very capable."
Again with the double entendre... Not flirtation. Not quite business either. Something balanced carefully between. Helena blinked slowly at that. She pondered on the double meanings of his words; a peculiar character he was.
"If we come to terms," Alfie continued, voice low and even, "that congestion you've been experiencin' clears up real quick."
In the corner, Sebastian's jaw tightened, his protective instinct flaring through the strain. Helena saw it out of the corner of her eyes. Felt it. But her gaze never left Alfie, it only narrowed slightly.
"And what," she asked softly, "would you expect in return?"
Now... Now Alfie smiled properly. A slow, knowing smile that showed his teeth a bit.
"Just a conversation to start, Miss Almington."
His eyes flicked briefly to the candlelight between them. Then back to her.
"See if we might be useful to each other."
