“Miss Elderwood is an aspiring botanist.”
“Are you a botanist yourself, Sir Silas?” Elswyth said.
Silas shrugged, then looked at her significantly. “I never enjoyed the natural sciences. Too much creeping about in the hedges for needless observation.”
Elswyth’s face flushed. Before she could retort, Dr. Gall spoke.
“Silas is an archeologist—not my usual fare for assistants, but I’ve known him since he was a boy,” Dr. Gall said, clapping Silason the back. “A brilliant lad, and it helps having someone who can reach the top shelf!”
Elswyth cocked her head, clenching the fabric of her gown. “And tell me, Sir Silas, is archaeology as physically strenuous as it seems? I imagine it’s a lot of panting and sweating in overgrown ruins.”
To her surprise, Silas smiled. “Yes, but the fruits of our labor are so exquisite,” he said. “You should join us sometime, Miss Elderwood—it is so much more satisfying than creeping about in hedges.”
Elswyth lowered her eyes at him. “I’ll stick to the hedges, thank you.”
Silas observed her with a slightly amused expression, chewing on his lower lip. Heat rose in Elswyth’s belly, and she looked away, back to her sutures.
“You will have many opportunities to work together, I should think!” Dr. Gall said. “Wonderful, wonderful—oh, how exciting this will be!”
Elswyth followed Mrs. Rose as she strode through the gardens outside the conservatory. Along the gravel path, decorative trees bore bright flowers even in the early spring. Royal gardeners stood on ladders beneath the hedges, pouring vitæ into the blooms to keep them fresh and twisting topiaries into impossible forms.
Mrs. Rose ignored all of it. She spoke in a hushed voice to Elswyth as they made their way to the carriage. Elswyth’s right leg ached, but the sutures held, and Dr. Gall had applied a numbing agent before she’d been allowed to leave.
“Absolutely not!” Mrs. Rose said. “Under no circumstances will you be allowed towork.”
“It’s not work, not really,” Elswyth said. “It’s an occupation. Weren’t you just saying that a lady should have hobbies?”
“Croquet! Crochet! Cello! These are hobbies befitting a lady of your station, not, not—”
“Pursuits of merit?”
“Precisely! Thepointof these hobbies is that they are meaningless. They show that you are so well supported financially that you needn’t dirty your hands with actual work.”
Elswyth sighed. “Yes, but I am not well supported financially. And if I cannot find a match, I may need a pathway to employment. This could be just that.”
Mrs. Rose raised a hand. “Your father will hear of this. He will have the final say. As for now, I am so irritated that I don’t think I can speak of it any more, lest I faint.”
Mrs. Rose went quiet. Elswyth wondered what her father would say—perhaps she could frame it more as gardening than scholarship, and convince him. Her Uncle Percival had done a wonderful thing, connecting her with Dr. Gall, and she would hate for the introduction to be wasted. If she worked diligently, made a name for herself… perhaps she could earn her way into a scholarship.
The thought should have excited her. Instead, she thought only of Persephone. Pursuing academics—the very same academics she had given up to come here, to find answers—would certainly interfere with her search for her sister. And yet she wanted it, wanted it perhaps more than she’d wanted anything before.
Stop it,she thought to herself.Stop making excuses. You made a promise. You will find your sister, no matter the cost. If this is the cost, so be it.
And yet… she had no way to search for Persephone if she could not escape Mrs. Rose. Accepting a position at the Royal Gardenswould, at the very least, give her a few hours a week out of the house, unsupervised. It was a start.
“… and another thing!” Mrs. Rose said. “That blasted man! The tall one, with the rather… statuesque physique.”
“Sir Silas,” Elswyth said. She’d explained to Mrs. Rose earlier that he was the man who’d pursued her in the hedge maze. That was another reason to accept Gall’s offer. There was something suspicious about the man—he and his lover had seemed willing to do anything to cover up their secret affair. Elswyth had very few suspects in her search for Persephone. The world of nobility was a small one; Silas might very well have known her sister. And a man willing to kill to protect his secrets was certainly a man to watch. She thought again to the bouquet in her sister’s room: hellebore, with its spiraling purple-black petals.Calumny. Ruination.
“No, I was not surprised at all to learn that he was fornicating in the bushes. A known rake, that Blackthorn. Lord Harrow’s bastard son, from the colonies.”
“I thought you didn’t know him,” Elswyth said, looking over her shoulder. “You asked his name.”
“I needed to remind him of his place,” Mrs. Rose said. “Blackthorn is no name. He chose it because he has no name from his father.”
“He is natural-born, then?”
“Upon some princess from India, I hear—but his father acknowledged him, and so those at court must treat him as the son of an admiral, although he is nothing but abastard.”
