The House of Hidden Wonders

by Sharon Gosling

  A hasty truce was drawn up between the pirates and a moment later Nell and Aelfine came running towards Zinnie.

  “Zinnie,” Nell puffed, out of breath as she threw herself down on the blanket beside her big sister. “We’ve decided – we’re coming to South America too. Aelfine and me. We don’t care about the big spiders, or the bugs, or even the snakes.”

  Aelfine shuddered. “Maybe about the snakes,” she gulped, eyes wide. “A little, tiny bit…”

  Nell grabbed her hand, squeezing hard. “It doesn’t matter about any of that,” she insisted. “We’re going to come even if we’re scared, Zinnie. We’re both really good sailors and swordfighters. You’ll need us.”

  Zinnie smiled. This wasn’t the first time the two youngsters had declared their intention to join the expedition.

  “But what about Sadie?” Zinnie asked. “If you three come with us, she’ll be all on her own.”

  “She can come too,” said Aelfine. “We’ll need a doctor.”

  “She’s not a doctor yet. She must stay here to learn how to become one. You three need to stay with her too, to keep her company and stop her getting lonely. Anyway, if you all come with us, who am I going to tell stories of my adventures to when I get back?”

  “But we want to come with you!” said Nell, pouting. “We’re sisters! We’re supposed to stay together! We’re supposed to look after each other!”

  “Oh, pippin, give me a hug,” Zinnie said. Nell threw her arms round Zinnie’s neck. Zinnie held out her free arm and Aelfine curled into it. Sadie saw what was happening and put down her notebook and pencil, coming over to join in the hug. Zinnie, Nell, Sadie, Aelfine and Ruby the monkey, all holding on to each other in a silent pledge to never let go.

  “We’ll always come back together,” Zinnie said. “No matter how far away we go, or where, or what we do. That’s what sisters do.”

  “Sophia,” Zinnie heard Lady Sarah murmur, as she and the doctor looked on. “I do believe that, given time, these girls could turn the whole wide world upside down all by themselves.”

  “We can but hope, my dear,” said Doctor Jex-Blake. “We can but hope.”

  Although this story is a work of fiction, there are a few aspects of it that are based on history. If you want to find out more about anything you read here, your local library will be able to help.

  Mary King’s Close and the other underground closes of Edinburgh still exist and you can visit them – the entrance is beside the Royal Exchange on the Royal Mile. You can take a guided tour that will explain more of the history of the site. There were actually people living in the semiburied streets until the first decade of the 1900s, when the last shop finally shut and the family who owned it moved out.

  Arthur Conan Doyle became, of course, the inventor of the modern detective novel with his stories about the uncanny deductions of Sherlock Holmes.

  Fans of Holmes will know that the detective sometimes employs the talents of the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’ – a group of street children who know the city of London even better than he.

  In 1879 Conan Doyle was 20, and a student at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. There he was taught by surgeon Joseph Bell, a doctor with a remarkable knack for using astute observations in his diagnoses – this would later become a hallmark of Sherlock Holmes’s detective style.

  In September of 1879, Conan Doyle had his first story published – The Mystery of the Sasassa Valley, a story about two young men discovering the truth behind the local legend of a ghost in Africa. The story was published anonymously and remained so until 1893, when an American edition added Conan Doyle’s name to a reprint.

  The supernatural had a huge influence on Conan Doyle’s later life, and he became a firm believer both in the existence of ghosts and that there were mediums who could act as a conduit to the afterlife.

  Sophia Jex-Blake lived during a time when it was difficult for women to have any career, let alone a medical one. When Jex-Blake decided she wanted to become a doctor, finding a university that would take female students was almost impossible. Eventually the University of Edinburgh allowed Jex-Blake and six other women to study there, but the women were met with opposition both from fellow male students and their tutors, which only escalated as they began to demonstrate that they were just as capable as their male counterparts. The hostility culminated in the ‘Surgeons’ Hall Riots’ in 1870, when the women tried to attend an anatomy exam and were prevented by a violent mob of 200 people. The university then decided that the women would not be allowed to graduate, meaning that they would not be able to practice medicine. The women had to leave Scotland and go to other universities in England and America to obtain their medical degrees.

  Jex-Blake finally received what she needed to be recognised by the General Medical Council in 1877. In 1878, in a stroke of defiance, she moved back to Edinburgh to open her practice, and became the first woman doctor in Scotland. Her first clinic was at 73 Grove Street, and she lived not far away at 4 Manor Place, where there is a plaque commemorating her residence. When her practice grew she moved to 6 Grove Street and established the Edinburgh Hospital and Dispensary for Women.

  Jex-Blake later set up the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, which taught women from all over the world. She moved to Bruntsfield Lodge on Whitehouse Loan and when she retired the hospital moved into that site, the first Scottish hospital to be staffed entirely by women.

  Isabella Bird is briefly mentioned as the inspiration for Lady Sarah’s Hawaiian riding habit. She travelled all over the world alone, wrote many books about her journeys, pioneered travel photography (at one point washing her fragile glass photography plates in the Yangtze river in Asia) and became one of the first female fellows of the Royal Geographical Society in 1891. In 1869, though, she had taken a tour closer to home – to the tenements of Old Edinburgh, then wrote a pamphlet called Notes on Old Edinburgh in an attempt to raise money for better conditions. My favourite quote from it reads, “Bairns reared in such places are like lambs born among precipices – they early learn to take care of themselves.” Sounds like Zinnie, doesn’t it?

  The history of Edinburgh is written into its architecture and it takes someone who knows the city inside out to read it properly. When I started researching The House of Hidden Wonders I contacted Robert Howie, who conducts historically focused walking tours of the Old Town. I asked if he could tailor one for me that centred on the Victorian period and he produced a brilliantly informative walk that provided me with a great background against which to write this story. He was also extremely generous with his own research materials and I will be forever grateful to him for his input. I thoroughly recommend one of his tours the next time you visit Edinburgh – his website can be found at www.historicedinburghtours.co.uk.

  I am hugely grateful, as always, to my wonderful editors at Stripes, Ruth Bennett and Ella Whiddett. Thank you for always being so enthusiastic, thorough and caring – I have learned so much from working with you, and both of you have helped me to become a better writer.

  The same goes, of course, for Ella Kahn, my agent at DKW, who always has an overwhelming amount of faith in my stories, for which I cannot express my thanks enough. Without you most of my ideas would be discarded before they even got to the page.

  Huge thanks to Marg Hope who designed the wonderful cover and to Hannah Peck for the illustration – I’ve never seen my characters as images before and I love them. Thank you to Sarah Shaffi for the additional reading to help me with Aelfine and to Jane Tait for the (very thorough!) copyedit. Thanks also to Charlie Morris for her tireless efforts in publicising my books, and to the rest of the team at Little Tiger, each of whom are instrumental in getting a book like The House of Hidden Wonders on to the shelves. Thank you.

  Last but never least, thanks to my ever-patient husband Adam Newell. While I wrote this book, he let me drag him all over Edinburgh multiple times; put up with having a huge print of a postal map of the city in 1879 hanging in our living room; waite
d for hours while I pored over photographs in the National Library of Scotland; used his expert skills as a second-hand bookhound to track down volumes for research; drove me two hours out of our way to find the only available copy of Shirley Roberts’ biography of Sophia Jex-Blake – and that was on top of the usual downsides of being married to a naturally cantankerous author. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  About the Author

  Sharon Gosling is an award-winning writer who lives in Cumbria. Her first middle-grade book, The Diamond Thief, won the Redbridge Children’s Book Award in 2014. Her young-adult horror title, Fir, was shortlisted for Lancashire Book of the Year 2017. The Golden Butterfly was nominated for the 2020 CILIP Carnegie Medal. She also writes books and articles about television and film, and has written, produced and directed audio dramas.

  Sharon lives in a small fell village with her husband Adam, who has a second-hand bookshop in nearby Penrith. When she’s not writing or reading, Sharon helps out in a café above the bookshop, makes art using a linocut set and creates jewellery.

  @SharonGosling

  STRIPES PUBLISHING LIMITED

  An imprint of the Little Tiger Group

  1 Coda Studios, 189 Munster Road,

  London SW6 6AW

  First published in Great Britain in 2020

  eISBN: 978–1–78895–270–5

  Text copyright © Sharon Gosling, 2020

  Cover illustrations and map copyright © Hannah Peck, 2020

  Article illustrations © Sharon Gosling, 2020

  Author photograph © Lucien Xavier

  The right of Sharon Gosling to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition, being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, settings, events and incidents which bear any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, are either entirely coincidental or the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.