Arthur Pemberton found the glass eye in the dead snake's mouth and laughed. It was small and shiny and round, like a bead, and it caught the morning light through the rookery window in a way that made it look like a jewel. Arthur had never seen a jewel. But he had seen men in pubs throw down money that was worth more than his entire existence, so he assumed a glass eye from a dead snake was worth at least a penny.

He put it on the kitchen counter. Martha found it while he was at the pub, which was most mornings. She was a match factory girl—forty hours a week making matchsticks, her fingers stained with phosphorus, her lungs filled with dust that would kill her in ten years if not fifteen. She saw the glass eye and picked it up and put it in her mouth, thinking it was candy. She had not had candy since before the baby.

Arthur came home at eight that night and the glass eye was gone. He asked Martha about it and she said she had eaten it and he said, "What was it?" and she said, "I don't know, it was shiny."

Arthur went to bed and didn't think about it. He thought about the three pints he had drunk and the woman at the pub who had laughed at his joke and the bottle of gin under the bed that he was saving for a special occasion. There would never be a special occasion. That was the problem.

Martha didn't speak the next day. Or the next. She sat in the corner of their room—room number four in a building that had twenty rooms and all of them were the same size and smelled the same and sounded the same, because the rookery did not care about individuality—and stared at the wall.

"Martha?" Arthur said on the third day.

She didn't answer. She didn't move. She just sat there, her hands in her lap, her eyes fixed on the wall, and occasionally she made a sound like a hiss.

Arthur didn't care. He went to the pub. He drank. He came home. Martha was still in the corner.

On the seventh day, Arthur went to the music hall. He had heard about a new act—"The Serpent Woman," they called it. A freak show attraction. A woman who had been transformed by a snake bite into something not quite human. Arthur thought it sounded like fun. Maybe Martha would like it too. He hadn't done anything fun for Martha in a long time.

The music hall was full of men with red faces and women with too much makeup and children who were too loud. The Serpent Woman was in a cage on stage, sitting cross-legged, staring at the crowd with eyes that were dark and empty. Arthur recognized her on the third night, when Martha hissed at a man in the front row and the man threw a tomato and it hit her in the shoulder and she didn't react.

Arthur watched from the back of the hall, drinking gin from a paper cup, and felt something he had not felt in a long time. Pride. Not for Martha. For himself. He had found something valuable in a dead snake, and now his wife was earning money because of it. Two shillings a night. That was more than he made at the docks, and he wasn't even working at the docks anymore.

Reverend Croft came to see him on the twelfth night. The Reverend was a thin man with a thin voice and thin clothes, and he smelled of gin and regret.

"Mr. Pemberton," he said, "your wife is suffering."

"She's earning us two shillings a night," Arthur said.

"She is a human being, sir, not a sideshow act."

"She's worth more in that cage than she would be anywhere else."

Reverend Croft looked at him with eyes that were sad and tired and knowing. "Mr. Pemberton, have you ever looked at your wife?"

"Every night," Arthur said. "From the stage."

That was the truth, at least. Arthur went to see Martha every night. He sat in the back of the music hall and watched her in the cage and drank gin and felt proud.

On the forty-ninth night, Martha bit two men in the audience. One lost a finger. The other had a nervous breakdown and had to be carried out. Arthur was arrested but released for lack of evidence. The magistrates didn't believe a working-class docker could be responsible for something so unusual.

Arthur walked home through the London fog, past the pubs where men drank to forget, past the workhouses where men died in their sleep, past the music hall where his wife sat in a cage. He got home. Martha was in the corner. She hadn't spoken in forty-nine days. He hadn't spoken to her in forty-nine days.

He sat down and opened a bottle of gin and drank.

Martha watched him from the corner with her dark, empty eyes. She didn't hiss. She didn't speak. She just watched.

Arthur drank until the bottle was empty. He put his head in his hands and sat in the dark.

In the morning, the glass eye was on the kitchen counter again. Arthur picked it up and looked at it and laughed, because he couldn't think of anything else to do. He put the glass eye in his pocket and went to the pub. Martha was still in the corner when he came home, still staring at the wall with the same dark, empty eyes. She would be there tomorrow. And the day after that. Probably for the rest of her life, just like Arthur would be there in the pub, drinking gin, pretending that his wife was earning them two shillings a night meant something. It didn't. Nothing did. The glass eye sat in his pocket, hard and round and useless, just like everything else Arthur owned. He went to the pub. He drank. He came home. The rookery groaned around them, its twenty rooms all breathing the same stale air. Somewhere above them, a man was coughing. Somewhere below them, a child was crying. Arthur Pemberton sat in the dark and drank, and nothing changed. Nothing would change. Nobody cared. Not the gin, not the rookery, not the city of London, not God if He existed. Nobody cared about Arthur Pemberton or his wife Martha or the glass eye in his pocket that was worth less than nothing.

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