Chapter Three
Yew trees, like elderwoods, are often found in cemeteries and churchyards across Europe and were considered sacred by the druids.
They are also prized for their wood, which was used in medieval Britain in the making of longbows.
In floriography, the inclusion of the poisonous yew berry signified sorrow.
Elswyth woke with her face pressed to the glass window of the train.
Beyond the steam of her breath, she saw the shifting countryside.
Eight hours before, the train had thundered through the crags and forests of the Wildwood, steaming across bridges spanning wave-speckled lakes and through dark rows of trees smudged by rain, signs of humanity few and far between in the ancient wood.
Now villages seemed to appear and vanish every moment, hamlets and homesteads and stony hovels filled with dour-faced farmers.
Snow lay thick on barren fields, and steam spewed from the train, dancing against her window in serpentine clouds.
A knock came at her compartment door. An attendant stood there, waiting for her acknowledgment before entering.
He was handsome with pleasant brown eyes and broad shoulders that fit squarely in his uniform.
“Twenty minutes to London, miss,” he said.
Elswyth nodded but did not meet the man’s gaze, turning her scar away so he would not see.
It was considered uncouth for a lady of breeding to travel unsupervised, after all, but her maid was needed in the Elderwood House, and so she had made the journey alone.
She resumed her book, a sluggish text titled Ethnobotany and Empire: Botanical Exploration in the Reign of Queen Viscaria.
But she found she could not focus. Outside, the villages flicked by faster, becoming whole towns and then suburban estates with sprawling gardens.
The estates gave way to the city with its lines of row houses and then factories, their smokestacks throwing smog into the gray sky, and then the train wound through a maze of tracks, weaving between freight cars and coal-stained engines until it slowed beneath an atrium of iron and glass.
The smell hit her the moment she stepped outside.
It smelled nothing like home. It was the smell of ash and rot, of wet, molding things and black soot.
She’d not been to London since she was a little girl, since before her mother died and her father locked himself away in Elderwood House.
She remembered the stench, but not like this.
It was overpowering, as though the air itself were made of sewage.
But what surprised her most were the people.
The entirety of the village below Elderwood House was only half of what she saw disembarking from the trains.
They were disheveled, in dirty clothes of wool and tweed and cotton, stained with travel and patched over a hundred times.
Men and women and children, whole families stepping down from the train cars, carrying sacks slung over their shoulders.
They looked starved, their faces gaunt, the men and women thin, the children pale and fragile.
They moved past her in throngs, shepherded by a policeman in his black uniform.
“Third class, this way!” the policeman bellowed. “All those third class, this way!”
He kept his billy club outstretched, blocking the throng of people from coming toward Elswyth. They funneled down another corridor.
“Miss, first class is this way,” said the porter. He gestured down the platform toward a waiting set of double doors.
“Where are they going?” Elswyth asked the man.
“Workhouse, most likely,” the porter said.
“Droves of ’em coming in from the countryside now, what with the famine.
Come on, miss.” Elswyth frowned. It appeared the Elderwood lands were not unique in their suffering.
Famine had England in its grasp, and not only England—in the throng of refugees she saw Irish, Indian, and European families as well, coming from other ports.
The porter pushed her luggage trolley toward the door. She watched the third-class passengers swarm the stairs, catching the eye of another girl, perhaps her own age. Elswyth turned away, ashamed to meet her gaze.
“You know where you’re going, miss?” the porter asked. He was a towheaded youth with a sailor’s build, fixated on chewing something out of his finger.
“Lord Devereux is going to escort me to Mayfair.”
“You know what ’e looks like?” the man said.
Elswyth scanned the crowd. “I have not seen him since I was a child.”
“Right. Well, I can’t be waiting around here all day, savvy?” He tapped his palm.
“Oh. Right, yes…” Elswyth opened her reticule. She took out a few pence and handed it to the man, whose smile dimpled as the coins slid into his palm. He counted them, frowned, and then tapped his palm again.
“Miss Elderwood?” a voice called from behind her.
She turned to see a man walking in her direction.
His skin was dark brown, and his speech was laced with an accent she could not quite place, a subtly concealed music.
He wore a fine suit of black wool and clutched an ebony walking stick.
A bowler cap hung low over his brow, covering his shaved head.
Most intriguing, however, were his scars, small brown mounds that lay in rows over his cheekbones and forehead.
Elswyth had read about such markings—ritual scarification common in some cultures of West and Central Africa—but had never seen them outside of illustrations.
They fascinated her, though she tried not to stare.
She had her own scars, after all, and knew what it was like to be the object of morbid fascination.
The well-dressed man smiled at her, removing his hat. Then he turned toward the porter with an amused expression. “I think six pence is a wonderful tip. Don’t you, friend?”
The porter—not seeming very pleased—mumbled that it was fine.
“Ah, well. I suppose it is a good deal of luggage. Here,” the well-dressed man said, “for your trouble.”
He took a silver coin from his pocket and offered it to the man. A shocking amount of money for a tip. The porter stared at it for a moment and then snatched it from the other man’s palm without looking at him.
“Thank you,” the porter mumbled, “sir.” Then he scurried away, head low.
The well-dressed man sighed, watching the man go.
Then he turned to Elswyth. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Elderwood. Kehinde Ogunlana at your service,” he said.
He pressed his hat to his chest and bowed elegantly.
“I am your Uncle Percival’s steward. He sends his regrets, but parliamentary business has called him away.
I am here to retrieve you in his stead.”
Elswyth returned his bow with a curtsy. “My uncle mentioned you in his letter. It is good to make your acquaintance. Although I do not know how you picked me out from this crowd,” she said, gesturing to the swarm around them.
“Your uncle described your appearance to me.”
Elswyth frowned, instinctually turning her scarred side away. “Of course.”
“Apologies, Miss Elderwood. I did not mean to cause offense.”
“None taken, Mr. Ogunlana. I have lived with my scars for a long time.”
Kehinde smiled, tapping the marks on his own face. “Something we have in common. And please, Miss Elderwood, call me Kehinde. Come—your uncle’s coach awaits.”
Kehinde pushed the luggage cart forward with surprising vigor.
He moved through the crowd effortlessly, even with the cart, and soon they were outside, in the open air.
The street outside King’s Cross was a filthy thoroughfare bustling with people.
Carriages and omnibuses rattled past them, depositing their passengers on the station’s steps.
Brick buildings rose above the street, each as tall as Elderwood House but crammed together into rows.
Kehinde hailed the carriage and it stopped before them, pulled by lithe gray mares. As he strapped her trunks onto the rack, Elswyth let her eyes wander around the street. People shouted, carriages bounced on cobblestones, and soot-covered children ran through the crowd.
A young boy stood on the station’s steps, holding a stack of newspapers. He called out to anyone who passed by, and a small crowd surrounded him, handing him coins and taking their papers. “Reaper Returns! Girls butchered! Three pence!”
Elswyth approached the boy, hesitated for a moment, and then handed him three pennies from her reticule. The coins disappeared into the boy’s pocket, and Elswyth took her paper. The headline read, in bold black print: “Reaper Strikes Again. Dreadful Mutilation of a 5th Woman.”
“Miss Elderwood?” called Kehinde. He stood, looking at her curiously, at the door to the carriage. Elswyth tucked the newspaper into her handbag, concealing it, and then stepped inside.
The carriage stopped before a stately house in Mayfair, far from the soot and filth of King’s Cross.
It was a stone manor house, snow-covered with wintering ivy that crawled over a red door.
The gate was small, and a gravel path led through slumbering flower gardens on either side.
They rattled past a stone sign that read IV DEVEREUX PLACE.
Elswyth disembarked from the carriage, onto the street, where Kehinde unloaded her trunks.
All around her, women in their finery dallied along the concourses, taking their daily walks.
The carriages were large and private, and quaint shops lined the streets.
The air still reeked of a city, but Elswyth felt she could breathe through her nose again.