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Covent Garden Flowrs, Thursday Morning 10/16

Eliza really had washed her face and hands before she come, she did. But after she was pelted on this morning's delivery run by what looked like multi-coloured sleet, no amount of soap and water seemed to have a blind bit of effect on the blue and green blotches down the left side of her face, or her thoroughly violet hands.

Lovely. If by that you meant some other word entirely that was much less fit for company. Still, there was a shop to be opened, and open it Eliza did. As the rain of stones had battered the latest temporary E into oblivion, she fixed up another, this one of floral wire and several different hues of carnation, and altered the sign in the window to match.

Covent Garden Flowers

Eliza Doolittle, prop.
Fresh flowers from nosegays to bouquets!
Delivery available upon request.

~~~~Now Hiring for Friday position~~~~

[OOC: open!]

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Ask for a job, apologize for drowning her, marvel at how oblivious she is to the confirmed-bachelor-friendly nature of her new sign....

5% off if you display more than 7 distinct colours without having to remove any clothing.

I have often walked on this street before, but the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before....

Miss Elizabeth Bennet was thoroughly displeased with the splotches of color appearing on her skin. She had nearly convinced herself that they proved adequate reason for delaying this trip, but her conscience won out.

She entered the store, looking at all of the pretty flowers, and half-heartedly hoping that she had the wrong address or that the other woman would not be present. Selfish, Lizzy.

Eliza looked up from a vain and rather reflexive attempt to rub the colour off at least the palms of her hands. She sighed. Perhaps she could just pretend they were gloves? The very latest fashion, all the way from wherever the ladies around here got ladies' gloves from.

"Hel--" she began, then she got a glimpse of the newcomer. Who seemed... familiar, somehow. Which made no sense whatsover, since she was the first female Eliza had met since she entered this town who didn't seem in need of a wrap and several more feet of skirt. Eliza would have remembered seeing that before, surely? "--lo?" she finished after far too long a pause.

Miss Bennet steeled her nerves with some effort and smiled gently at the other woman, offering her a proper curtsy. She could have passed her on the street unwittingly, but knowing this to be the proper address, it was certainly the young woman she had ... maligned.

"Good day," she said. "My name is Miss Elizabeth Bennet, and I believe I owe you a ... most severe apology."

Well, the face might be familiar, but the name meant nothing to her, aside from the fact that they shared it. Eliza frowned, vastly confused, but then realized how rudely she must be coming off, and turned it into a vastly confused smile. Better than nothing, right?

"I'm Eliza Doolittle; welcome to my shop, Miss Bennet. Are you quite sure you've got the right person?"

"Your shop is lovely," Miss Bennet said, smiling. "It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Doolittle. Indeed, I believe it was yourself, though perhaps you've a sister, in which case, I shall offer my regrets to both. I fear ..."

This did require drawing a nervous breath, but decorum insisted she go on. "I was not ... myself, of late. I caused terrible harm to my landlord, though I find him to be alive, by some divine mercy that I deserve not. I feared that you were much the same, after ... our altercation, in the pond."

That earned her only a blank stare for a moment, then Eliza's eyes widened to a point where the less than charitable might refer to them as bulging. "The pond?"

Suddenly the familiarity of the face - if not the clothing - began to take shape.

"I swear to you," Miss Bennet said hurriedly, "I am a decent, God-fearing woman. I would call it a spell of madness, thinking myself some wretched undead creature, but even that does not account for all that has happened. My landlord insists this island amuses itself at our own expense. I know not what to believe. I can only be relieved that I did not ... I really feared that I had murdered you."

Eliza stared on, for a full half minute, speechless in a way that even she would admit to being rarer than hens' teeth, before instinct took over, and she found a half-crazy laugh burbling out of her mouth. Then another, and another.

"That really happened?" she gasped out between the fits of it. "With the mud? And the..." Watching her own fingers move as she tried to describe herself splashing about brought on another gale. "The blubbedy blub blub?"

It took Eliza a few seconds, and then she clapped a hand over her own mouth and dissolved into fits of laughter herself.

"I told everyone I walked the night," she ventured, eyes dancing. "I offered my assistance at the clinic. I also left my poor landlord in my closet. And I never, ever wish to discuss what I was wearing."

Eliza cackled. There was no calling it anything else. "I thought it was all a dream! I woke up in my bed right as rain come Monday morning." Then her cackle turned into a cough. "Oh, my lord, the flowers."

"My landlord accosted me with holy water," she related. "I could hardly object. Which flowers?"

A moment later, she had remembered which flowers.

Hence the very unladylike staring-in-horror.

Eliza's eyebrows rose, then she dropped her face to her hands. "At least I didn't actually do... whatever it was?" Some things, you can't un-know. But you can pretend. Very, very hard. "Apparently that was a terrible corner to be scrapping over. I didn't turn a penny all weekend."

"If your occupation was what I uncharitably suggested it might have been," Eliza said, her own cheeks crimson, "then I shall consider myself very relieved that you were unable to ... successfully ply your trade. If it's any consolation, I managed to turn my own teaching assistant into a dark creature of the night. How I am to face him in my next class, I can't begin to imagine."

Eliza raised her face, unsure whether to laugh again or smack it several times into her purple palms. "A dark creature of the night? Like a penny dreadful story?"

"I said the most unimaginable things," Eliza confessed. "I told a priest that I was an abomination who walked the night, feasting on souls and other such dreadful cliches. Really, it wasn't enough for me to violate several laws and dress in garish ways; I also seemed to have lost most of my wits."

"You're not alone there." The Eliza who wasn't the other Eliza shook her head ruefully. "Was there something in the water, d'you think?"

"I'm afraid this island finds such misadventures amusing," Eliza-who-was-also-an-Eliza shared. "I arrived one morning to teach my class, only to discover a number of them were not themselves, but were the opposite sex for the day. Library books spent one week turning into kittens. Some of the residents seem to take such matters in stride, though I daresay I can't imagine how."

One imagined strong drinks were perhaps involved.

"...Kittens?" Why that stood out to her more than the other one, Eliza couldn't say. They were both equally impossible, after all. "You're having me on."

"Would that I were," Eliza laughed. "I'm still not entirely convinced that I haven't gone mad while en route to London, when I ended up here. This could be some elaborate fever-dream, though two months is a little long for such things to last."

"I came from London," Eliza replied slowly. "But if it weren't-- wasn't for the shop being here when I arrived, I would wonder if I hadn't ended up in the wrong place." She raised her rock-stained hands, turning them over, then tracing one down the side of her equally colourful face. "Possibly Bedlam."

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Covent Garden Flowrs, Thursday Morning 10/16

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