She exhaled a long slow breath. The day’s travels had not afforded her a moment of stillness or privacy, and she craved it like a dying man craves water. She was a scholar, after all; silence was as essential to her as air.
Elswyth moved to the balcony, weaving through the gauzy curtains. She pressed her belly against the balustrade, taking in the last of the day’s light. The sun was a red fire in the west, casting bloody streaks through the branches of the massive oaks that stood like guardians around Devereux Place. Below, the garden glittered with snow and the bright red berries of the ancient yew. A high brick wall ringed the house, giving Elswyth some respite from the chaos of London: the endless labyrinth of carriages and people and noise. Devereux Place seemed to her like an oasis of silence in a desert of sound.
Elswyth abandoned the balcony when it became too cold, closing the glass-paned doors behind her. She lit the oil lamp that saton the writing desk, and flickering light illuminated the compartments full of letters. Persephone’s letters.
She picked through them. Most were invitations, correspondence with other ladies agreeing to tea or dinner or charity events. There were also stacks of calling cards from minor lordlings seeking Persephone’s company. Elswyth lingered over these. Who had she fancied among them? Who had she rejected? Persephone had always been beautiful, had always been the object of some man’s desire. Could that turn to rage, if not returned? Murder, even?
A few books lined the shelves, which amused Elswyth—she could count on one hand the times she’d seen Persephone reading. She thumbed through a text calledA Lady’s Guide to Botanical Magicand a reference book of floriography and then she sat down to read the letters. They yielded nothing of import, or at least nothing she could immediately recognize as important. There were precious few letters that Persephone had written but had not sent, and Elswyth read them feverishly, running her fingers along her sister’s familiar script. Like a true noblewoman, Persephone was skilled in saying much without saying anything at all. She dodged suitors with her pen the way a skilled fencer parries with a sword.
There were only so many love poems about Persephone’ssilver’d hair and wine-dark eyesthat Elswyth could stomach. She neatly replaced the letters, but something nagged at her. She opened her reticule, removed the newspaper she’d procured at the train station, and began to read about the murdered woman in the East End.
Five women, dead. All of them poor and implied—she thought—to be prostitutes. All of them living in the tangle of East End slums known as the Rows. Elswyth flipped to the center ofthe newspaper, where the front-page story continued. A sketch of the dead woman’s body sprawled over the page. Her torso had been cut open, her organs removed and laid in the snow. From the empty space in her stomach, a patch of wildflowers grew. Elswyth felt bile rise in her throat, but she forced herself to continue reading.
The exact manner of the Reaper’s most recent victim’s death is unclear,the article read,although a source within the coroner’s office is said to have reported that Miss Fairburn’s womb was removed from the scene of the crime by her attacker. Floromantic warping has also been noted around the victim’s wounds as well as within her abdominal cavity. Although the connection between the removal of the organs and the vegetative growth remains uncertain, similar conditions have been recorded in each of the Reaper’s victims, including—
Elswyth slammed the newspaper closed, clenching her eyes shut. For just a moment, she’d imagined the woman as Persephone: her sister’s ribs cracked open and flowers growing from her bloodied womb. She took a moment to breathe, steadying herself against the desk. Then she looked back at the newspaper and the sketch of Hazel Fairburn’s body. The flowers growing from her corpse had six petals. Six petals, six stamens. White, although she couldn’t say for sure from the sketch, with a single dark vein through each.
Asphodel,she thought.
She paused with her hand about to turn the page. It had been her sister’s favorite flower, yes, but certainly the murders of these women had nothing to do with Persephone. And yet asphodel was not a common flower; it did not thrive in the British climate. Furthermore, its meaning in floriography was grim:My regrets follow you to the grave.She supposed that made sense for a murderer. Butwhyregrets? Was the killer leaving a message, trying to say that he regretted murdering these women? What sort of killer had remorse for his victims?
Elswyth could not bear to think of her sister meeting the same fate as the woman in the newspaper. Made into a spectacle, with her body plastered across the front page to titillate the masses. To Elswyth, it seemed the final indignity of Hazel Fairburn’s short and likely difficult life. The papers called the Reaper’s victimsunfortunates, which was meant to imply they were prostitutes, or something like it. The city was not kind to women like Hazel Fairburn in life, and it did not cease its cruelty in death. It ate women like Hazel—not once, but twice. First the city consumed their body, either through years of grueling labor or, in Hazel’s case, all at once. And then it consumed them again in sensational papers and ballroom gossip. It put their half-naked corpses in ink and sold them in the newspapers for three pennies a piece.
And Elswyth grieved for them. Not only because she was a human being, but because, like the dead women, she could feel the city eatingher, too. It was not the same—her struggles would never compare to theirs—and yet she felt herself slowly sliding down the throat of the same beast. Oxford, gone in an instant. Marriage next. Children. The world wanted only one thing from her, it seemed: an organ the size of an apple, just below her navel. Most of the time society found other ways to take it. The Reaper used a knife instead; perhaps that was more honest.
Elswyth, unable to think about it anymore, tucked the broadsheet into the drawer of the writing desk and away from curious eyes. Then she stood, straightening her gown and moving to the bed. She knelt down to look beneath it but found only dust.Another search beneath the mattress yielded nothing. The closet held a garish menagerie of gowns, each more colorful than the last.
Elswyth moved to the vanity, examining herself in the mirror. Persephone would have sat in that same spot, agonizing over her appearance. She touched a hand to her scar and thought of Kehinde—the patterns on his face, so symmetrical compared to her own. So different in their origins, and yet they did share one thing: pasts they were unable to hide.
And what of her uncle’s steward? How had he come to London? There were people from all over the world in the city, and yet his presence in Percival’s household would certainly raise eyebrows. Some might even avoid associating with Lord Devereux because of it. And Percival seemed to treat him as an equal rather than a servant. There were no other staff in the house, no maids or footmen that she had seen. It was a most unusual arrangement for a lord of Percival’s rank. And though Kehinde had seemed friendly and good-humored, any man close to Persephone had to be investigated. Both Percival and Kehinde would need to be watched.
Elswyth frowned and hated the way her scar twisted in the mirror. Her desire to learn the truth of her sister’s disappearance forced her to think the worst of everyone. She hated that, too, but she supposed she hadn’t expected goodness in people since the day her mother died. In that way, at least, she was well suited to her current task.
Elswyth rifled through the drawers of the vanity. There were creams and powders and coloring, a few tinctures of plant extracts and perfumes. To the right of the mirror, a dried bouquet languished in a chinoiserie vase. The vase was beautiful and clearly expensive, made from white porcelain with a repeating pattern of cobalt-blue honeybees. But the bouquet was a few months oldat the least, though it was hard to say precisely. Elswyth traced her finger on the dried petal of a flower. She summoned vitæ from within her, letting it slip into the dead plant, and the flower swelled, turning from gray to crimson. It breathed, unfolding, alive once more—if only for a moment. When she pulled her hand away, the bloom faded and turned the color of ash. The petals fell one by one, already crumbling into dust.
She examined the rest of the bouquet. The arrangement was an eclectic mix, almost too eclectic to be pleasing to the eye. Most of the flowers she did not recognize, half-dead as they were, but some she did: sweet pea, acacia, hellbore, a smattering of butterfly weed.
Something occurred to her then. She stood, moving quickly to the writing desk on the opposite side of the room and taking the reference guide for floriography. She flipped to the back of the book as she returned to the vanity, running a finger down the page.
If a gentleman sends a lady a bouquet of red roses, he is indicating that he holds a powerful, romantic love for her.
She frowned—she could have guessed that much—and there were no red roses in the bouquet. Suitors would sometimes send messages hidden in flowers, their meanings only understood by those trained in the art of floriography. But Elswyth had always preferred true botany to its more fanciful cousin, and so she leafed through the guidebook, searching foracacia.
If a lady receives a bouquet of acacia, it indicates desire for innocent friendship.
Elswyth made a note of the meaning and flipped to the end of the book again.
Sweet pea is used to indicate farewells. If a lady receives a bouquet that includes sweet pea, it is meant as a goodbye or a parting of ways.
Elswyth hesitated, tapping her finger on the page. She must have interpreted the message wrong. Why would a suitor send a message that suggested a desire for innocent friendship alongside a farewell? There was no indication the bouquet carried a romantic meaning, and yet flowers often did. Had Persephone been scorned by someone? The idea that Persephone—who Percival had called the diamond of the season—could be rejected by anyone baffled Elswyth. But while the Elderwoods were an old house, they were no longer wealthy or powerful. These things mattered in the marriages of the nobility.
She continued identifying the flowers but could make no sense of the bouquet. Then one flower in particular caught her eye—a patch of small blood-red blooms. She looked uprhododendronin the book on floriography. When she did, her blood cooled in her veins.
Beware,it said,I am dangerous.
CHAPTER FOUR
The rose has countless interpretations in floriography, varying by color and cultivar. Although often associated with fleeting love, some rose plants have been known to live for centuries. In ancient Rome, a rose plant suspended from the ceiling meant that everything spoken “under the rose,” or sub rosa, was meant to be kept secret.
