Chapter 3

She pulled out coins in small denominations until she totaled three pounds, locked the box up tight, and returned the key to Liza. Half the family's assets were tied up in the shop's inventory, which was valued at around forty pounds. This thirty pounds in cash represented the remaining half of their savings, yet it was only enough to cover six months' rent. This stash was Liza’s lifeblood; touching even a farthing caused her physical agony. She was consenting to use it now only because the shop had run at a loss last month, and with the local murder causing a uproar, their walk-in customer trade had been cut in half. Without profits on the balance sheet to fund new inventory, she had no choice but to dip into her nest egg. Right now, Liza felt like hanging herself. Tucking the key carefully back inside her clothing, she worried Dalie might miss something and instructed: "Check the display cabinets. In the drawer under the front counter, you’ll find the inventory manifest and the old wholesale receipts. Buy whatever we're short on, and stick strictly to the prices on my previous receipts. If someone charges more, walk to a few more wholesalers. And if anyone tries to pull a fast one on you, tell them that once I'm back on my feet, I won't let them off easy!" When Dalie’s father, Fred, had gone restocking earlier, he had been swindled by a liquor wholesaler named Ronald, who had exploited Fred's confusion over the varying fluid capacities of gin bottles. Liza had already planned to pay Ronald a visit the moment she recovered, letting all of Saint Albans Street know about his short-weighted, dishonest ways. Dalie offered a quiet acknowledgment, gathered the plate, pocketed the cash, and headed downstairs, navigating the narrow staircase to the ground floor. scaled for small spaces, the first floor was equally cramped. The front area housed most of the retail shop, while the staircase opened directly opposite the kitchen and a small utility room. Inside the windowless, gloomy nook lay a row of cribs housing five infants only a few months old. These were the neighborhood infants. Parents paid Mary two pence a day per child for daycare services. Milk or goat's milk was billed separately as extra income, though some brought their own, making it a variable source of revenue. Most of these neighbors worked in the various small factories along nearby Jude Street. Local women returned to work merely two or three months after giving birth, spawning a booming trade in cheap childcare provided by women forced to stay home to tend to their own households. Dalie leaned her body inward, squeezing past the tight stairwell into the kitchen, and set the plate down into the ceramic sink connected to the drain. The kitchen spanned roughly seven or eight square meters. A back door opened onto a half-meter-wide drainage ditch, flanked by a glass window. By the window sat a coal stove, the sink, and a dish cupboard topped with spice jars and a gas lamp. Against the left wall stood a small table serving as both a prep counter and dining table, accompanied by a lone stool. The right wall held a basin rack crammed with enamel bowls. The kitchen was dark and damp, its brick walls peeling. Yet compared to neighbor's kitchens shared among three or four households, these living conditions were considered quite plush. Dalie stepped over to the stove to lift off the heavy tin kettle. Finding the washbasin she shared with Penny, she poured in a splash of hot water, then grabbed the toothbrush and tooth powder the original Dalie used from the window sill. After washing her face, she rinsed her mouth into a slop bucket. Mary was warming milk over the coal stove, preparing to feed the neighbors' infants. Spotting Dalie heading toward the storefront on an empty stomach after washing up, she abandoned her pots, grabbed a slice of bread from the table, and hurried out. Blinded to Dalie's momentary surprise, she jammed the bread impatiently into her daughter's hand. "Forgetting to eat... honestly..." Before Dalie could say a word, Mary turned on her heel and retreated to her milk pots. Resigned, Dalie took the dry, buttered, pan-fried bread and devoured it in three quick bites. Out in the front shop, Hank took advantage of the wait to sit behind the counter, enjoying his own breakfast—likewise consisting of two slices of buttered bread. Dalie recalled that her father and grandfather earned eight pounds a month combined from their milk delivery routes. Mary brought in a net profit of two to three pounds monthly by minding the five local babies. Meanwhile, the small grocery store brought in six to eight pounds a month during good times—though last month’s slow trade yielded a meager three or four. Thus, last month's total family income had dropped to fourteen pounds, all handed over to her grandmother to manage. After paying five pounds for rent, nine remained. Out of that, two pounds went toward Dalie’s school tuition for the month. The remaining seven had to cover four shillings for the communal water pump subscription, three shillings for drainage ditch maintenance, and one shilling total for shop tax (sixpence) and the tobacco-tea-liquor license (sixpence). That left six pounds and twelve shillings. Liza handed five pounds to Mary for the month's food budget, leaving precious little after accounting for incidental expenses. This month, any restocking costs or unexpected emergencies would force them to draw directly from the savings Liza had painstakingly hoarded for years. Dalie ran the numbers in silence. If current trends held, the shop's income would sink even lower this month. If retail earnings could no longer cover the rent, remaining in school was a luxury they couldn't afford—and besides, she had already mastered everything taught on the curriculum in her past life. Parting the fabric curtain separating the stairwell from the retail space, she stepped into the front. spread before her was a small shop floor of barely ten square meters. The doorway was narrow, and the windows were thin, grimy, and dimly lit. Packed into this tight space were eight high counters and two low counters, arranged in a semi-enclosed "日" shape structure. It closely resembled a bank teller window. Normally, customers could not handle merchandise themselves; every item had to be fetched and handed over by the shopkeeper. Under such an arrangement, an employee unfamiliar with inventory would become flustered, while one lacking salesmanship would fail to move stock. Grandfather Hank sat slouched behind the cheap cigar counter. Finishing his breakfast in two big gulps, he used a chipped porcelain mug to steep a pinch of cheap tea dust. Dalie located the inventory manifest in a drawer beneath the cigar display. Written in blurred quill ink on yellowed paper, the list was penned entirely in Liza’s hand. It itemized roughly one hundred goods, with fast-moving stock marked in red ink and high-inventory items highlighted in green. To anyone other than Liza, the sheet was absolute gibberish. Seeing Dalie review the manifest and organize stock behind the counters with fluid efficiency, Hank looked up, slightly surprised. "You can actually read that list?" Positioned near the canned goods shelf, Dalie didn't even turn around, offering only a simple "Mm." During her early days running wholesale operations with her former partner, she had worn multiple hats. Facing chaotic shipment manifests every day where every clerk used a unique bookkeeping quirk, she had quickly learned to decipher the underlying logic of any record with a single glance. To Dalie's trained eye, though tiny, this grocery store was riddled with operational flaws and operational leaks. First was hygiene. The display counters were secondhand pieces that reeked of damp, decaying wood, dangerously close to rotting and growing mold. Replacing the fixtures was unrealistic, so she made a mental note to procure tung oil or wood wax to coat and preserve them. Furthermore, no one had bothered to give them a thorough cleaning; during Liza’s bedridden spell, a thick layer of dust had settled over every surface and windowpane. Next was inventory presentation. During his last run, her father Fred had brought back canned tomatoes and cocoa powder, but his lack of retail experience led him to restock blindly, shoving older stock behind fresh shipments. While modern canned goods lacked clear expiration dates, manufacturers stamped production batch numbers onto the bottom of each tin—the smaller the batch number, the older the stock. Packaging for canned goods during this era was far from standardized or airtight, and London was rife with low-quality canning operations. Prolonged storage still led to bulging, air leaks, dampness, and spoiled food. Selling spoiled goods could trigger heavy fines if reported to the health inspector. Whether for tossing waste out windows or selling rotten food, the inspector possessed the authority to levy fines of several shillings per infraction. Every month, Liza bribed him with a box of cheap cigars to avoid trouble or bad-faith complaints. Still, overlooking batch dates was an easy mistake for inexperienced storekeepers to make. Dalie pulled out all five or six varieties of canned goods, sorting them methodically by batch sequence. The display case featured ten shelf tiers; dedicated entirely to canned goods, each tier could accommodate forty tins. They currently held forty-six tins of canned tomatoes. Examining the packaging, Dalie noted that their canned inventory originated from a firm named Javott Foods. A white paper label printed with red copperplate lettering reading Javott Brothers was pasted to the tin, while the manufacturer's address was stamped on the base: Building A30, Byng Street, St Pancras Parish, Metropolitan London—just north, near King's Cross Station. Checking the old receipts, she saw the canned tomatoes had been bought wholesale at three pence per tin with a minimum order of forty. The manifest listed the retail price at five pence per tin, or two for nine pence. Liza possessed a decent sense for retail promotions, always reminding customers that buying two saved money compared to buying one. With twenty shillings to a pound and twelve pence to a shilling, selling out this batch would yield a profit of at least sixty-nine pence. Continuing her inventory check, Dalie discovered that high-turnover staples—soap, matches, sealing wax, and baking soda—were entirely out of stock. Her lips twitched slightly as her patience wore thin. Yet, considering the family's grueling pace of life, Liza's injury had left the store completely untended. Handing the reins to Mary—who was illiterate, skilled only at cooking and child-minding, and now burdened with nursing Liza—it was a miracle the shop was even open at all. Dalie spent half an hour conducting a swift audit of the shelves. Nineteenth-century consumer goods were vastly less varied than those in her past life. Memorizing the stock levels for every item posed no challenge whatsoever. Now equipped with a basic understanding of the store's inventory, Dalie prepared to step out to handle the restocking, using the journey to observe local customer traffic and scout competing businesses. Before leaving, she grabbed two burlap sacks from beneath the counter and called Mary out to mind the shop. She then set out alongside her grandfather, heading south along the narrow alleyway. The southern outlet of Clark Street led toward Jude Street, while the northern exit connected to Dorset Street. Their destination was Whitechapel Road, accessible via the south. Though only half a mile away as the crow flies, navigating the winding, snow-covered alleys would take a solid half-hour walk. As for Spitalfields Market and Petticoat Lane—Liza's go-to restocking haunts—they lay near Saint Albans Street, merging directly into Whitechapel Road. That entire area formed the heart of the East End's most bustling district. Relying on the original Dalie’s visceral aversion to the area, Dalie sensed that "bustling" was hardly a compliment. Yet to secure goods cheap enough—well below market rates—one had to venture into this sector. Property in London's East End was cheap, drawing wholesale merchants for tobacco, tea, and alcohol alongside factory distributors into a single dense cluster. Though railways crisscrossed the nation and London possessed an underground network, stations were few and far between. For now, she couldn't benefit from modern transit and had to rely on her own two feet. Following her grandfather south, Dalie stepped out of the southern exit of Clark Alley, only to be greeted immediately by a grocery store operating on a scale vastly superior to her family's. In truth, most residences lining Clark Alley mirrored her own: narrow, cramped, low-slung structures built of drab brick, featuring peeling wooden doors, rotting roof tiles, and a total absence of architectural flair or historical charm. Poverty knew no fashion; these houses hadn't changed since the eighteenth century. Every building was either used to run a business while squeezing a family inside, or subdivided to house three or four households at once. Reaching the intersection with the main street, she stood at the narrow corner and peered toward the street end. The Pierrot Grocery before her stood out like a swan among ducks against the drab backdrop of the alleyway. Occupying an entire standalone building, the establishment boasted wide glass display windows, clean red-brick walls, and cream-colored classical pillars framing the porch, adorned with fresh pine boughs. As morning sunlight flooded the entrance, young women clad in cotton bustle skirts streamed in and out, enjoying a thriving trade at the early hour.