Chapter Twelve
The lotus flower’s ability to rise above the mud in which it blooms makes it a symbol of purity and enlightenment in some Eastern religions. In Greek mythology, however, consuming the lotus flower caused one to sink into a state of blissful apathy.
Venus invited Elswyth back for dinner the following week, and now Elswyth sat across from an unfortunate-looking fellow named Mr. Plum.
He was a rather dull and mean-spirited man, and Elswyth wondered why Venus had seated them together.
Surely he could not have been a potential match for Persephone.
The man was a commoner, after all. And beyond that, he was pale and bespectacled with dull, uninterested eyes.
Elswyth had always tried not to judge a person based on their appearance, with varying degrees of success.
She knew, from living with her scar, how quickly most were to equate beauty with goodness, and deformity with evil.
Unfortunately, where it concerned Lignus Plum, Elswyth surmised his exterior and interior beauty were roughly equivalent.
“Of course the professors are all radicals,” Mr. Plum said, biting into a piece of chicken. “Some of them are nearly treasonous, I’d say, with their ideas about the colonies. And now admitting women. What have we come to, as a country?”
Elswyth ignored Mr. Plum and watched the servants bringing out the next dish.
She sat at the end of the longest dining table she had ever seen.
At least a dozen people sat to her left, eating from countless silver trays stacked high with food.
Servants—mostly immigrants from colonies—placed new dishes on the table and then produced fruit from their fingertips: huge pineapples and mangoes and apples and plantains.
The main course was filet de boeuf, bloody in the middle and served with butter enfleurage with blooms of lilac, lavender, and hibiscus suspended within.
“Academic types are never as clever as they think,” said the man next to Mr. Plum.
He wore a navy captain’s uniform and had a supremely British look about him: blond hair, a thin straight nose, and sharp blue eyes.
He waved his glass of absinthe lazily. “A military man knows how these people really are. The colonies need the empire to save them from themselves. Just look at the rabble pouring into London right now. When they want something, they come right to us.”
This man—Captain Coriander Burr—was of more interest to Elswyth than Mr. Plum.
She’d managed to corner Hyacinth Thatcher after her comments at Venus’s party.
Hyacinth had informed her, after some coercion, that Captain Burr had obviously carried a torch for Persephone and that she’d rejected him rather publicly.
She claimed to have seen them in the garden together, but Persephone had vehemently denied it.
The captain was below Persephone’s station, after all, but he was apparently a close friend of Prince Oliver’s—a fact he had readily boasted about all night.
He’d somewhat recently been promoted to the rank of captain for valor shown at war, although which war and what particular act of valor seemed to change with each telling.
He was a man accustomed to killing, at least, and he’d had a reason to loathe Persephone. That made him very interesting indeed.
“Hm, quite right,” Mr. Plum said. “And just look at the result. Crowding and disease. Women, slain in the streets. Doubtless the Reaper came from abroad. An Englishman could never commit such barbarism.” Behind Mr. Plum, a servant spun a pomegranate from her fingertips, as though delicately crafting pottery.
She placed it on Mr. Plum’s plate, and he waved her away.
He began to eat, taking the seeds in bunches, red juice staining his lips.
Elswyth watched the servant move to the next plate. With each new fruit, it seemed as though her wrists grew thinner, her cheeks more sunken. A green-blue bruise peeked from beneath her sleeve, a sure sign of withering from expending too much vitae.
Captain Burr spoke again, loudly, as if daring anyone to challenge him. “Military men—that’s who should be teaching in these schools. No nonsense, no fancy ideas, just the hard truth.”
From next to her, Silas spoke. He’d been silent for so long that he seemed to materialize out of a cloud of his own brooding. “And what truth is that, Captain Burr?”
Captain Burr turned to look at Silas, as if realizing for the first time that he was there.
Silas hadn’t yet spoken to Elswyth and had mostly ignored the other guests.
“That the British Empire is the greatest civilizing force on the planet. Surely you must appreciate that—I would have thought your father ensured that you received a proper British… education.”
He chose the words very carefully, but a smile still tugged at his lips.
Mr. Plum perked up at this. “Yes, that is a good point. What was your education like, in the colonies? Do you have schools in India?”
Silas turned to Mr. Plum with an unreadable expression. “No,” he said flatly, “we’re raised by crocodiles and taught to make tea with our teeth.”
Mr. Plum stared at him stupidly for a moment, pomegranate juice glistening on his chin.
“He’s mocking you, Plum,” Captain Burr said.
“I heard you didn’t leave a ship for the first thirteen years of your life, Blackthorn.
” He smiled, leaning forward. “That you followed Lord Harrow like his shadow. That you were barely out of leading strings when you witnessed the Rape of Rajpur. Is that true? I wonder what that must do to a boy.”
Captain Burr leaned back and grinned, tapping the table twice with his fingers. “What was it like? Come on, tell us.”
Silas smirked, but his eyes remained lifeless. “That much is true.”
“Don’t keep us waiting,” Mr. Plum said. “I love adventure stories as much as the next fellow.”
“Yes, Silas, be a good sport,” Captain Burr said. “I heard that Lord Harrow fed the royal family to his hounds and made the whole city watch. Wasn’t your mother a princess of some sort?”
Silas glanced at Elswyth, sitting next to him. Then he looked away, taking a drink of absinthe. “We are in the company of the more delicate sex, gentlemen. Perhaps we will continue this conversation over cigars.”
Captain Burr looked at Elswyth and frowned. “Of course. Apologies, Miss Elderwood.”
“Do not censor yourself on my account,” she said. “I am not na?ve to abuses in the colonies.”
Mr. Plum stopped chewing, surprised. He cast a look to Captain Burr, who cocked his head and folded his arms across his chest. “Abuses, Miss Elderwood? I hear you are a scholar. Is it colonial politics that you study?”
“No. It is botany. Although there is a fair bit of overlap between the subjects. Whole colonies exist to extract botanical resources, after all. Tea, opium, rubber, sugarcane. Why, even after a fungus destroyed most of Ireland’s potato crop, we here in London still took what was left.”
It was too bold a thing for a lady to say, and she realized it the moment the words left her mouth. He was a decorated military man. She might be noble, yes, but she had no title of her own, and more than that, she was a woman. Expected to be as beautiful and silent as the flowers on the table.
Burr smiled thinly. “Perhaps. And yet how bountiful would their harvests be, without our steel and steam?”
“I suppose now we will never know,” Elswyth said.
Under the table, Silas nudged her leg with his. The firmness of it sent a chill up her spine.
Burr took a sip of his wine, evidently ready to be finished with their conversation. “Yes, well. Good luck with your studies, Miss Elderwood. I see they’re teaching you ladies all kinds of fascinating and useful things in schools these days.”
Elswyth bristled. Her next words came out of her in a flurry.
“They do, Captain Burr. For example, did you know that the Irish potato blight came from abroad? It landed on their shores and spread across the entire island. Then it ate what the people grew until they starved. But I do not think anyone would call the potato blight an empire. We call it a parasite. And the thing about parasites is that they die with their hosts.”
A silence fell over the room. Glasses stopped clinking; servants stalled as they fabricated spices onto food.
At the other end of the table, Lord Forscythe loomed, silver-haired, his golden medals decorating the lapel of his coat.
He wiped some of the bloody beef from his lower lip with a napkin and then waved away another pour of wine.
He said nothing, but his steely eyes lingered on her.
Next to him, Percival sat with his arms extended as though interrupted in the middle of a story.
His face had gone pale, a worried frown barely visible beneath his beard. He stared at Elswyth with frantic eyes.
“Your words come dangerously close to treason, Miss Elderwood,” Captain Burr said. He spoke slowly. “I would refrain from such speech in the company of the queen’s men.”
Heat rose in Elswyth’s cheeks. She thought of Mrs. Rose hovering behind her, begging her to keep quiet. If she alienated these people, she would not find a husband, and she would certainly never find her sister.
To her right, Silas raised his glass, breaking the silence. “Indeed. Long live the queen!”
The partygoers raised their glasses in return, grateful for the distraction. “Long live the queen!” they replied in chorus.
Silas turned to the servant behind him. “Let us switch to wine, please, and three brandies for the gentlemen.” The servant—the woman fabricating pomegranates—nodded and disappeared into the kitchen. The rest of the table resumed their conversation, and a steady hum of merriment filled the hall.
Elswyth inclined her head to Captain Burr, speaking quietly. “Perhaps I spoke out of turn.”