Disarming

Macavity Award Nominations 2012, Best Mystery Short Story."It took Anna Hoyt two days before she left her small room at the Southwark inn. She had not been ill a single day during her voyage, despite the late season and roughness of the seas, while some passengers had never left their cabins. Nor was it the distressing contents of the letter she kept in her Bible that paralyzed her. It was the sheer size of London, looming beyond her window, shrouded by icy fog. Even her life near the Boston wharves hadn’t prepared her for the tumult she encountered by the waterfront, slippery with briny mud. She was nearly run down twice before she found a carter willing to take her and her luggage. The driver incomprehensibly cursed her when she asked him a third time to repeat his price; at length she understood he was speaking English, but with the thickest Welsh accent she’d ever heard. He urged his horses into the gloom, muttering to himself as Anna clung to her seat, miserable and shivering in the frigid January rain."