Emma Holloway - A Study in Ashes

“I will see you expelled!” Bickerton finished with a roar loud enough to penetrate her stunned hearing.

Expelled! Her eyes snapped open. She clutched at her bracelets, knowing they bound her to this place for her own safety—because the alternatives for a magic user like her weren’t good.

“You cannot!” she protested.

“Take note and learn, Miss Cooper.” Then he turned on his heel and went to speak to the horde of men arriving to deal with the disaster.

Expulsion? What will Keating say? What will he do to me?

Jasper Keating, the man they called the Gold King, had soldered the bracelets around her wrist—a mark of his patronage and her prison. Wherever she went, the bracelets signaled her presence to Keating’s minions, making her easy to find. They also delivered a painful shock if she strayed out of bounds. She was his property as surely as if she were in chains.

He was one of the steam barons, the foremost businessmen in the Empire with interests in everything from coal to war machines. He’d learned of her magic when she’d bargained away her freedom for the life of the man she loved. And now that he knew her secret, freedom was out of the question; magic users were under an automatic sentence of death.

He’d allowed her to attend the university as long as she never left the grounds. The arrangement was generous, given that the alternatives for someone with magical Blood were execution or a short, brutal future as a laboratory rat. And now—at least as far as public opinion went—she’d shown that his generosity was misplaced. Her patron did not like being in the wrong.

Another small explosion went off inside the burning building, letting out a cloud of stink and sparks. Evelina sank to the ground with a noise halfway between a groan and curse. Mr. Keating is going to be very displeased indeed .

London , September 18, 1889

LADIES’ COLLEGE OF LONDON

3:30 p.m. Wednesday

TWO DAYS LATER, EVELINA LEFT THE LADIES’ COLLEGE AND crossed the University of Camelin grounds toward the New Hall, which looked as if it was at least three hundred years old. Plane trees lined the narrow, cobbled road, their wide leaves giving a dry rustle in the light breeze. Though the air was cool, the afternoon sun and the rising slope of the path made her warm, and she paused to catch her breath.

She had been here nearly a year. The weather brought back the previous autumn, when Keating had first forced her into his service. The job had taken her into the slums of Whitechapel, but it had also reunited her with her childhood sweetheart, Nick. She turned her face up to the sunlight, feeling its warmth even as her chest tightened with grief. After so many years of coming together and parting over and over, Nick had finally become her lover.

She remembered him as a boy, brown-skinned and fleet among the horse-wagons, teasing her as he took the last of Gran Cooper’s thick brown bread. He’d make her chase him for it, her shorter legs struggling to keep up, but he’d always surrendered it in the end. She remembered him performing in the ring of Ploughman’s Paramount Circus, daring impossible feats with his flashing knives. And she remembered him as he was when he left her, promises to return warm upon his lips. He was an outlaw and finally, after so long, her lover: Captain Niccolo, pirate, last seen on the Red Jack as it careened in flames to earth.

That battle that had changed everything. She’d traded her freedom to save Nick’s airship from Keating’s guns, but her sacrifice had come to nothing. Nick was dead, she was a prisoner, and the last year had been the loneliest of her life. Though it would have ruined her in the eyes of Society, a child would have left her at least something of the man she loved—but even that comfort had been denied her.

And alone, she would go to face the consequences of the laboratory accident. Grief clawed its way up Evelina’s throat. She squeezed her eyes tight to hold back tears. If I give in and cry, I might not stop . She bit her lips together, refusing to let them tremble. It was a battle she quickly lost. Tears leaked from under her eyelashes, and she hurriedly wiped them away. The last thing she wanted was to stand before her judges red-eyed and sniffling.

This won’t do . She had to go on; Nick himself would demand no less. Despondent, she began walking again, the soft soles of her boots scuffing on the cobbles. She blinked away the last wetness from her eyes and looked around, hoping no one had seen her moment of weakness.

To her right were the mellow stone arches of Fullman College, to her left Usher College with Witherton House and its regal gardens behind. Gowned faculty clustered around the buildings like crows, but this close to the heart of the university they were an almost exclusively male flock. The Ladies’ College of London was at the bottom of the hill, secure behind high walls. It was part of the university, and not.

Rather like her—and based on Professor Bickerton’s harangue after the explosion, soon she wouldn’t be part of Camelin at all. If this summons to the vice-chancellor’s office unfolded as she suspected it would, her academic career would set before the sun did. And then what? Would she go back to working as a spy, or something worse? She couldn’t bring that future into focus. Every time she tried, her breath grew short.

Evelina noticed several conversations breaking off as curious faces turned her way. She looked over her shoulder, making sure there was nothing behind her that was attracting attention. That gave her a view of the lower campus, the blackened shell of the laboratory conspicuous against the pastoral green. Sick, cold dread settled in her gut, driving out the warmth of the sun. She tucked in her chin, letting the brim of her hat hide her face as she marched the remaining distance to the entrance of the New Hall. The watching faces followed her as if pulled by a magnetic force. There goes the silly woman who blew up the laboratory . As she neared the door, she shuddered, the touch of their gazes an almost palpable pressure along her spine.

Once inside, she mounted the stairs to the offices, her stomach a leaden ball of apprehension. Marie Antoinette could not have felt less doomed as she climbed the scaffold. But Evelina bravely knocked and entered the vice-chancellor’s chambers. When the young man who was his secretary rose to show her into the inner sanctum, she followed him with her gloved hands clasped nervously at her waist.

The decor did nothing to lighten the mood; the walls were covered in dark walnut paneling made darker still by age. As she crossed the faded carpet, the smell of old tobacco rose up, tickling her nose. Three men were ranged in a conversational semicircle of oxblood leather chairs. In her anxiety, she had half imagined a judge’s bench and uniformed guards, so the informality was a relief.

They rose as she entered. Bickerton was one, and another was old, white-whiskered Sir William Fillipott, the vice-chancellor. The older man bowed, his manners as always impeccable. “Miss Cooper, how gracious of you to join us.”

“Sir.” She curtsied, long training helping her to fall into the ritual of pleasantries. She’d always got along with Sir William, and hoped that counted for something now.

“You have met Professor Bickerton.” The vice-chancellor gave a rueful smile, and then indicated the third member of his party. “And this is young James, our new chair of mathematics. I have asked him to observe and record this meeting.”

Sir William patted the mathematician’s shoulder with a fond, fatherly gesture. The man nodded politely to Evelina, adjusting a small clockwork device that inscribed a squiggling code onto a wax cylinder. She had seen the police use similar equipment for taking statements. The brass contraption with its whirling gears was not the latest technology, but it was advanced for Camelin, steeped as it was in tradition.