Elswyth found her voice rising into a shout. Before she realized it, she had ripped her hands across the table, sending everything crashing to the floor. Papers flew into the air, vials shattered, and potted herbs exploded into spots of dirt. The living engine prototype smashed on the floor, spilling green slime onto the stone, belching more gas. Weeks of work, destroyed in an instant.
Elswyth stood, shocked, staring at the wreckage. She was not prone to outbursts. She made sure to keep her emotions in check; if she let them control her, she risked hurting someone. Looking at the shattered engine on the floor took her back to the dark room of her youth, where a body lay beside her on the bed, the smell of sickness and burnt flesh in the air. And her father, standing in the doorway, saying,Monster. What have you done?
Elswyth spoke again, curling her fingers around the edge of the table until they were white. It was the only way she could stop them from shaking.
“None of this matters, Uncle Percival,” she said, gesturing at the ruined experiment. “I will always be hideous. I will always understand plants better than I do people. And now Persephone will never be avenged, only because I will never be what these people want me to be.”
“Then don’t be,” he said, shrugging.
Elswyth paused. “What do you mean?”
He hesitated, as if considering something, and then stood. He moved to the floor, where the contents of the desk lay scattered across the stones. One of her plants lay in the shattered remains of its pot. He picked it up, cradling the root ball in his hands. Then he sighed and moved back over to the desk, looking at the sapling.
“When I was a boy, I was often bullied. Hard to imagine, I’m sure,” he said, smiling. “But truth be told, I was a fanciful lad. I lived in my head as much as I did in the real world. Never made many friends. Instead I spent all my time making up stories of the grand adventures I would have one day.”
He placed the sapling in a fresh pot. Something wistful passed behind his eyes. “Your mother protected me as much as she could—that was her nature, you know—but it was not an easy childhood. I got called all sorts of things. Words I’d rather not repeat.”
“Uncle—” Elswyth started. He waved her off.
“You know how boys are. A different kind of cruelty than girls, but cruel all the same.”
He added some new soil to the planting, patting it down withcareful fingers. She could see his age, then—his hands trembling around the stem.
“And then, when I finally came of age, I showed them all. I went off to Africa and had those adventures that I only dreamed of as a boy. And oh, what adventures they were. For the first time, I left polite society behind me, and I could see the world for what it was: a place of possibility. When I came back the first time, I was a hero. Those very same boys that bullied me were inviting me to parties, begging for me to regale them with stories of my travels.”
“What does this have to do with—”
Percival raised a finger to quiet her. Then he gently placed the saved sapling back on the shelf in front of him.
“I grew restless in London, and so I left again. And when I returned from Africa for the second time, Kehinde came with me.”
Elswyth paused, placing a hand on the worn wood of the table. Neither Percival nor Kehinde ever spoke of how they met or the precise nature of their relationship, which seemed to be one of companionship rather than servitude. Percival smiled at her knowingly. “At first, people treated him as a curiosity. It’s not every day you see a man with ritual scars walking the streets of London. Many of my former acquaintances immediately assumed he was my servant.” A look of sadness twisted Percival’s face, but he kept his voice steady.
“And when we corrected them—told them that Kehinde was not my servant, but my friend, that he had saved my life and that they should treat him as an honored guest—well, word got around quickly that I was a radical. They had, of course, more vulgar words for what I was. Whatwewere. And when it became public knowledge that the great Percival Devereux, who conquered the worldin the name of queen and country, had brought an African man back with him, and that the man was living in his house… Well, suffice it to say that polite society quickly cast me out.”
“London is filled with all kinds of people,” Elswyth said carefully. “I do not see the issue.”
Percival smiled. “Children never do.” Then he shrugged, toying with Elswyth’s microscope. “But I did try to take Kehinde to a ball once. Challenged the lord of the house to a duel for not accepting him in. That might have had something to do with it.”
Elswyth started. “What?”
“Oh, yes. That’s why Lord Cotton always wears a powdered wig. I’m afraid I took his left ear. Didn’t you know?”
Elswyth just stood there, mouth agape. Percival continued. “Of course we left again after that. This city would never accept us for what we were. I had never planned on coming back. Then Rowan—my older brother—died, and I became Lord Devereux, and the House seat passed to me as well. I wanted to shirk my duties, keep traveling, but Kehinde convinced me to return. He chooses to live in a city and a society that shuns him because we have an opportunity to change that society.”
“I never knew,” Elswyth said. She had wondered why Uncle Percival put up with Parliament when he seemed much more content with his books and his dinner parties. And Kehinde did seem to handle much of Percival’s parliamentary work, regardless of who actually sat in the lord’s seat.
Percival smiled. “He is the bravest man I have ever known. And me—well, I am a dilettante and a fop, a washed-up explorer with a bad reputation. And I still march through this city with my head held high, gossips be damned.”
Uncle Percival stood and cupped Elswyth’s face in his hands.She flinched away from it—she didn’t like people to touch her scar—but she hadn’t been touched in a caring way for some time, and the warmth of his old hands felt comforting, like her father’s.
“All of this to say: You are who you are, Elswyth. The parts of you that others loathe—your scars, your follies—you would do well to learn to love them. There are people who will hate you regardless of what you do. Do not do their work for them by hating yourself. Perhaps you cannot be the most beautiful, or the kindest, or the most graceful. Perhaps you are even cruel and strange and a monster besides. But you are your own. Remember that.”
Elswyth had needed the bath. She drew two in a row, the first to scrub the dirt and ash from her skin, and the second only to soak. Summer light came through the tall window in the bathroom, shining on the tile floor and over the clawfoot tub. She lay there with the window open and the birds chirping outside, tracing the surface of the water with her hands. From her fingertips, she secreted swirls of fragrant oils: lavender and pine and lemon and almond. The result was a multicolored sheen on the surface and steam that smelled of a greenhouse. She let the water soak into her, her head laid back on the porcelain. For the first time in days, she was at rest.
The door slammed open and Elswyth heard the familiar clack of small shoes. She leapt to cover herself with her hands, but Mrs. Rose had the good sense to avert her eyes.
“Mrs. Rose! This is most inappropriate,” Elswyth said.
