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From a very young age, Nancy had grasped the concept of death, and that grasp only tightened when she came to terms with the fact that her mother was going to die.
Not necessarily now, but soon. Sooner that she should. The girl first saw death when she'd wandered into the stables after school and found one her father's horses (her favourite out of the herd) lying unusually limp in the hay. Her dad told her not to look, and that he was in a better place since he was very ill and waiting for him to pass would only hurt more. She didn't like that idea, that reality, even. That waiting longer only hurts more.
Her discontent was proven correct when she was barely thirteen and the 179th Tunnelling Company returned with half of the men they'd left with. Not one of those men was Christopher Cochran, young Nancy had realised when Thomas Shelby from down the street bent down to her and gave her a flat cap. Her father's flat cap. She knew it was her father's own because the razor blade had been stitched over; something her father did to keep it safe in Nancy's bumbling hands.
Now at almost fourteen, Nancy Cochran had decided that even if she was discontent with death's disease, she must live with it for a little longer. Wait it out until it hurts. Lately, her mother's coughing had grown more grotesque, her skin cold and sickly to the touch. The doctor in town says it's merely cholera, so does her teacher at school. Merely cholera. To any other child, those words would send them six feet down in a second, but to Nancy they were an unsettling song of comfort. At least cholera was treatable, and that weary fact settled like a weighted blanket over the inevitable truth that soon enough one of these illnesses would rip her mother away from the world, by force or by forfeit regardless.
Now, on some days when she ponders over these brushes and tussles with death - like today - she'd soak her grief in sugar and sour sweets at her mum's shop, where she sat atop the till counter and gorged on peace babies while she mindlessly swung her legs back and forth. Nancy liked being sad in her mother's sweet shop, because it meant she wasn't sad for very long; she didn't have it in her to wallow in the midst of all the neatly cluttered mason jars and flowery papered walls.
She'd heard the bell above the door tinker in greeting, and she'd seen a lady quite clearly walk past the windows and through the door to stand in front of her. It just didn't quite register to Nancy until the lady started to speak, gently with a distinguished sort of accent for their part of town.
"Working hard or hardly working, Nancy Marie?" If these words were coming from anybody but Polly Gray, Nancy would likely just burst into tears. Through the lips of another, it would sound sarcastic, taunting even. But with Polly, it was maternal. Slightly concerned but not too much since it was quite obvious what was going on.
