‘Do you think I don’t know that most women would jump at a chance like this?’ I murmured. ‘I’m honoured that the great and grand Gregory Merchiston wants my hand in marriage.’
‘I’m not great or grand, Sarah. I’m a doctor from a poor family who somehow convinced the elitist bastards here that I was worth moulding in their image.’
I had seen what a good family name and money could turn men into, and I had no use for it.
‘I’m not going to be your wife. I’m going to be your equal, maybe even your superior. And one day I’ll come to you with a proposal from one of the most respected forensic surgeons in Edinburgh, and you can accept it if you still want me.’
Most men would have laughed in my face. But the slow smile that spread across Merchiston’s features held no mockery; only pride and the tenderest affection. I wondered for a moment if I really had done the right thing by rejecting his proposal.
He gave me the lightest of kisses, his mouth smiling against mine, and I realised as we pulled apart that while he wasn’t my first kiss, he was the first one – and maybe the only one – that mattered.
‘Four thousand words on the structure and use of formaldehyde with particular reference to its use in preserving the liver. On my desk by Monday, if you please.’ I looked at him, bemused. ‘Well, if I have to wait for you to graduate and begin your glittering career, we’d better get started.’
I felt unaccountably warm inside, as if I had just drunk some of his precious whisky. He believed in me. He didn’t dismiss my ambitions, grandiose as they were; he supported them. And not only that, he had given me extra work to do.
‘You know, some girls prefer flowers, Professor Merchiston,’ I teased.
He shrugged. ‘Then let them have all the bouquets they desire. You and I are motivated by something entirely different – even though preserved organs don’t smell quite as nice as roses.’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I smiled, resting my cheek against the rough tweed of his jacket and breathing in the smell of tobacco and sweat – and yes, formaldehyde. ‘I think they have their charms.’
Tempting as it would have been to stay like that all afternoon, I had work to do. As I strode out of the medical school and across Middle Meadow Walk, the trees with their budding, unfurling leaves casting shadows across my path, I felt lighter and more free than I had in years, giddy with anticipation that had surprisingly little to do with the man I had just left behind and everything to do with the building in front of me.
The Remington typewriter was a cumbersome machine, and I stabbed awkwardly at the keys until I produced the name of the hospital – the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. As I stared at the initial fruits of my labour, I felt goose bumps prickle across my skin. Here I sat, in one of the most august hospitals in Britain, in gainful employment. It wasn’t surgery, but it was closer than I had come to breaking through the myriad invisible barriers that stood in my way. Even in this small office, I could smell the disinfectant. If I listened carefully, I could hear the sounds of the hospital in action – doctors issuing orders, nurses obeying them and patients audibly praying that nothing would get lost in translation.
The hospital in all its red-brick, chloroform-scented glory only stood on the other side of the Walk from the medical school, but there were days when it might as well have been on the moon for all the chance I thought I had of practising medicine behind its walls. The typewriter felt like my Trojan horse – now that they had admitted me past the locked gates, there would be no getting rid of me.
Chapter 36
As I pushed open the door of my uncle’s house, I revelled in how tired I felt. Ladies, as Aunt Emily was forever reminding me, weren’t meant to exert themselves. But I had tried to be the girl they all wanted, sweet and simpering, and it had exhausted me more than I could have imagined.
‘Sarah?’
Aunt Emily’s summons had been getting friendlier of late, and any concerns that my aborted engagement would drive yet another wedge between us seemed to be unfounded. For all she scolded and interfered, she did it out of love, a love that had been markedly absent from her sister.
She sat by the fire, lamps burning brightly to ward off the dark and the cold and whatever lay in wait there. I wanted to go to her, to pretend for a moment that I was still the chubby little girl she had dandled on her knee, whose scrapes and scratches she had kissed better. That she was still the woman who could protect me. For a moment I was overcome with a fierce love for this rigid, resolute woman. She might not have known it, but our roles were reversed now – she couldn’t or wouldn’t see the evils that the world held, far worse than a torn skirt or a ruined reputation, than education or spinsterhood. I would do everything in my power to ensure that she never learned.
‘The son of a family friend is moving to Edinburgh from Aberdeen. He’s a lawyer and according to his mother has considerable suffragist sympathies.’ She said the word as though it were a rash – an unpleasant condition, but easily overlooked. ‘I thought we might invite him for dinner once he’s settled.’
I struggled to keep a smile out of my voice. ‘Perhaps. I’m going up to change, Aunt Emily. I look a fright.’
I ran up the stairs before she could elucidate further on the charms of this new prospect – legal, political and otherwise. She would never change, still so determined to bring me the kind of happiness she thought I deserved, still so incapable of realising that it would be more of a prison than a happy ending. I felt the weight of Merchiston’s gift in my reticule, and wondered what she would have said had she known I had turned down not one proposal, but two.
Gregory Merchiston was nothing like the men she had in mind for me – no title, no respectable family lineage, no fortune. He didn’t want me at home in the parlour, embroidering baby clothes and accepting visitors. His was a life that required a very different mate, a life soaked in blood and whisky, where a needle and thread would be used to stitch up the ragged edges of skin, rather than fine linen.
Did I want to be that mate? To be something more than a sleuthing partner or protégée, to have more than a sweet stolen kiss that awoke parts of me that had frozen over ever since Paul Beresford had taken more than I willingly gave? Did I want to erase that painful part of my past and give myself to this man?
I did. Oh God, I did.
But it wasn’t enough.
Perhaps there was something wrong with me. Perhaps I was damaged, unnatural. Even Julia and Edith, so happily ensconced in a Sapphic love affair I couldn’t quite fathom even now, looked to more than medicine to fill their lives. I had spent so long carving out my small space in the world, and I didn’t know if I was ready to share it – or myself. Gregory Merchiston was still a man, enlightened though he seemed to be, and he might be willing to overlook behaviour in a friend that he couldn’t countenance in a wife. Could he really accept that there was something else that made my pulse race, my breath catch? Even if I could take the risk, could he really marry me knowing that my heart was only half his and that the rest belonged – and would always belong – to medicine?
I kicked off my boots as Agnes drew me a bath, and began to pull off the tailored fawn wool suit that had, in the intervening hours between breakfast and dinner, become covered in ink and chemicals and something I decided was better off unidentified. It felt as though I was taking off my armour, and grateful though I would be to sink my aching muscles into the hot, rose-scented water, I wished I could keep it on just a little while longer. Let Sarah Gilchrist, medical student, sit down for dinner, and to hell with what Uncle Hugh thought.
The severe style suited me, I thought, catching sight of my reflection as I unbuttoned the collar of the crisp white blouse that had been starched into such stiffness that it still held its shape even as I tossed it into the pile on the floor. The swathes of silk and lace that my aunt would drape me in – even the pistachio-green taffeta that Agnes had laid out for me to change into for dinner – felt like a costume now. I couldn’t run in t
hose soft kid shoes and I would barely be able to breathe, much less eat, in a corset laced as tightly as it would have to be for me to fit into the dress. Part of me wanted to be able to lose myself in those pleasures again – I could dress as plainly as I wanted for lectures, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t luxuriate in colours and patterns and fabrics each evening. But when I looked at my wardrobe, all I could see was the tiny sets of clothes Aunt Emily had given me for my doll one Christmas. These were outfits I could be shown off in, admired, posed in, insofar as my corset would allow it.
For a moment, when I felt the heat of the fire on my face, it wasn’t the one that burned merrily in the grate but the raging inferno that had blazed its way through one of Edinburgh’s finest town houses. I felt that same snarl of heat and rage in my veins and I wondered what Aunt Emily would do if she came up here to find all my frills and furbelows in a pile of smouldering ash. Lock me up for good, probably, in the same genteel facility that now housed Aurora Greene.
Pushing thoughts of arson aside, I placed the dress back none too gently with all the other pretty things I found myself outgrowing, and instead picked out a plain poplin gown of dark forest green. Aunt Emily had been reluctant to buy it, but I had persuaded her that I needed something sober to wear to public lectures, and she had paid the modiste with a weary sigh. Somehow I doubted that even her young lawyer with all his calls for female advancement would be won over by me in this – although I remembered the heat in Merchiston’s grey eyes when he saw me smoothing the fabric down over my hips over dinner with the Chalmerses.
With a broken engagement behind me and years of study ahead of me, there could be no more room for meek acquiescence. I felt the mould my family was trying to force me into splinter and crack around me, no longer able to contain the woman I was becoming.
A woman who accepted presents from a gentleman who had made his intentions very clear, no less. As Agnes closed the door behind her with a quick curtsey, I pulled the package out of my bag and ripped the paper off in haste, like a child with a birthday present. What I uncovered took my breath away.
The mother-of-pearl glowed softly in the firelight. I ran my fingers over the smooth handle, but it was the dark metal of the gun’s barrel that held me enraptured. A strange gift to give the object of your affections, but then Merchiston was a strange man. It was the promise I had been looking for, that he would help my future endeavours, not hinder them.
A small box of bullets lay nestled next to the gun, and I picked it up to read the message scrawled on it in black ink by a familiar hand.
To S. G. – for when I can’t be there. All my fondest regards, G. M.
I knelt before the carved wooden box my mother had given me for my trousseau and placed the weapon beneath the filmy softness of the petticoats that would have layered beneath my wedding dress.
I might need them one day. But something told me I would need the pistol sooner.
Acknowledgements
The fact that these acknowledgements feel like they need to be twice as long as the one for The Wages of Sin is a testament of the amazing support structure I’ve found since then. This has a lot to do with Scotland’s overwhelming dedication to literature, from Nicola Sturgeon’s constant promotion of reading to Creative Scotland’s terrific funding team (I miss you all, but I don’t miss the terrible office coffee) and of course the incredible individuals who make up the literary scene in Scotland, especially the Woolf Pack. I always wanted to be able to thank a fabulous group of writers with a catchy name in my acknowledgements, and now I can! Particular thanks must also go to Angie Crawford of Waterstones in Scotland, Blackwells in Edinburgh, Mairi and the team (especially Artemis!) at Lighthouse Books and Julie at Golden Hare. I’m insanely honoured to have you selling my books.
None of this would have been possible without:
My wife Lola – I admit my choice of music at our engagement party was inappropriate but hey, at least no one got murdered!
My incredible agent Laura Macdougall, for putting up with me. Words can’t express how grateful I am for your support, which is ironic under the circumstances.
Imogen Taylor, editor extraordinaire, who I’m convinced can make a book better just by looking at it.
The rest of the team at Headline/Tinder Press, especially Amy Perkins – you all rock and I feel so lucky to have you in my corner (and on my social media feeds).
I write about families of choice and families of blood and am immeasurably lucky that mine happen to be one and the same. Dad, you’re my best friend and staunchest supporter and I hope this finally sets your mind at rest re: why I was asking about syphilis.
Meg Kissack, friend and coach extraordinaire. I literally could not have done this without you and I wasn’t kidding when I said I’m hiring you for every book in the future. You saw me through the most gruelling part of the process and made it fun again.
Islay Bell-Webb who inspires me by just being in the same room – please move up to Edinburgh so you can do it more often.
Deanna Raybourn – my best decision was wandering into Waterstones in Covent Garden to shelter from the rain and walking smack into a table holding Silent in the Grave. You are everything I would have imagined from that first sentence and a wonderful friend to boot, even if all your heroes do knock me a few places back down the Kinsey Scale.
Ruth, you are the Christina Yang to my Meredith Grey – smarter, more together and with better hair and always on hand with exactly what I need to hear.
Ali Trotta, who keeps me sane on the regular by letting me send her screenshots of my to-do lists.
Karen Burrows – at this point, you know more about me than anyone else and I’m afraid of what you’ll make public if I don’t include you. Friendship, like corsets, is a two person job. I’m very glad that friend is you.
Historical fiction relies so heavily on other people’s research, so special thanks must go to Alison Mould, Matthew Sweet, Kathryn Harkup and of course Elaine Thomas.
The bulk of this and every Sarah Gilchrist book was written at Elephants and Bagels, who said I could have a free bagel if I mentioned them here. I was going to anyway, but since you asked I’ll have smoked salmon and cream cheese on spinach with extra pepper.
And lastly, to Franklin, Orlando, Nora and Collins – I could have written this a lot faster if you hadn’t spent so much time lying on the laptop, but it wouldn’t have been as fun. I know you can’t read this because you’re cats, but I hope you enjoy lying on, gnawing and generally destroying this book as much as you did the first.
Also by Kaite Welsh:
The Wages of Sin
THE UNQUIET HEART
Pegasus Crime is an imprint of
Pegasus Books, Ltd.
148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2019 by Kaite Welsh
First Pegasus Books hardcover edition February 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN: 978-1-64313-749-8
ISBN: 978-1-68177-818-1 (eBook)
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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