A Lady in the Smoke (37 page)

The next morning, I took Athena to the station and stabled her at the Rose Inn. I wore my own clothes and left the veil behind; this time, I was going as myself.

The whole way to London, I watched the changing landscape out the window of my first-class carriage. The thrum of the train was steady. Oddly, my heartbeat was steady too. Perhaps because I had nothing to lose by trying. Or everything to lose by not trying, I suppose. I wasn't sure what I would say to Paul when I saw him; I certainly wasn't sure how I could explain any of this to my family afterward. That was all a muddle. But my love for Paul was present with a fierce clarity. And if I'd learned anything that day in the courtroom, it was that my most genuine feelings helped me find the words when the time came to speak.

The train pulled into Liverpool Street Station, and from the moment I stepped off it and greeted Mr. Flynn, my heart worked in fits and starts, all the way to Paul's rooms on Varens Street and up two flights of stairs. Mr. Flynn knocked, and I heard Paul's voice: “Who is it?”

“It's Tom.”

A pause, and then quick footsteps, and the door swung open. Paul didn't even look at Mr. Flynn; his gaze went straight to me.

“Hello,” I said faintly.

Paul gave Mr. Flynn a glare that said exactly what he thought of him at that moment.

“It's not his fault,” I blurted out. “I made him bring me.”

“I'll be downstairs.” Mr. Flynn's hand all but pushed me into the room. Then he closed the door with a quiet click.

Paul's room was plain, with a wood floor, a fine wool carpet, and a good oil painting above the wood-burning stove. Being at the top of the house, one part of the ceiling was shallowly sloped, with two dormer windows cut into it. It smelled of coffee and, more faintly, of cedar, from the trunk that stood open in the middle of the room.

If I thought I had only to appear for him to take me in his arms and kiss me again, I was wrong. He retreated behind a sturdy table. Next to it stood a second open trunk, smaller and piled high with books.

He took up several books, laid them in the trunk, and then clumsily rearranged them.

“Paul.”

He stopped shifting the books and braced both hands on the table, his head bent and his eyes fixed on the polished wood. His voice was low and raw with torment. “Why did you come? What good will come of a goodbye such as this—for either of us? My heart already feels like it's been raked over hell's coals—”

“Because I don't want to
remember
you. I want to be with you.”

He looked at me then, incredulously. “You know it's impossible! Elizabeth, I know why you said it in the courtroom—but it was also true. I'm
not
a man you can marry.”

“I only said that
society
would never consider such a match suitable—but that doesn't mean
I
don't!”

He raked his hands through his hair with a groan and remained stubbornly behind that table.

I felt tears beginning to form and fought them back. “Can you at least tell me why you're leaving? What's in Philadelphia?”

He gestured toward an oblong white envelope on the table beside me. “See for yourself.”

I reached for it, my fingers trembling. Inside was a single page written in an elegant hand.

Philadelphia Hospital for Surgery

1601 East Yelverton Street

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Dear Mr. Wilcox,

It is with great pleasure that we confirm your appointment as the Director of Railway Surgery at our hospital, with a remuneration of $180 per annum. I regret that our reply is so belated, but we ask that you come to us as soon as you have cleared all your obligations in England. The
Mirabel
sails in a few weeks and will deliver you to the port of Philadelphia in approximately a month's time.

Yours truly,

John Hanville, M.D.

Supervisor of Surgeons

I refolded the page into the envelope and tried to keep my voice steady. “You never said a word of this.”

“I applied for the position months ago—before I even knew you.”

“But why do you have to leave at all? You've been cleared! I know that the laudanum—”

“My hospital closed its door to me the day after the trial,” he broke in. “No one will touch me, at least for now—and I can't be a surgeon without a hospital.” He gestured around him. “I can't even afford these rooms anymore. Don't you understand? I can't stay here.”

“Well, I can't either!”

“Elizabeth, there is no point in this,” he said wearily.

I walked toward the window. Below, the cobblestoned street was dirty. I saw the tops of the hansom cabs, the tops of the horses, the tops of people's heads. Not one was staying still. Everyone was going somewhere.

I turned back to look at him. He was still standing nearly as far away as the room would allow, but he'd stopped pretending to sort through his books and was watching me.

I could think of only way to make him understand.

I began slowly: “When my mother was not much younger than I am now, she was in love with my uncle Charles, my father's younger brother, and they became engaged. But my grandmother wanted my mother's dowry to help keep Kellham Park afloat. So she found a way to separate them. She sent my uncle Charles off to Europe, concealed their letters from each other, and told my mother that my uncle had fallen in love with someone else—all so that my father—the elder of the two brothers, who would inherit the estate—could marry her instead.”

“My god,” he said, and there was both shock and pity in his voice.

“There's plenty more to the story, which I can tell you some other time, but the important thing—what I need you to understand—is that I spent the first ten years of my life watching a marriage where there was some civility, little if any love, and eventually resentment, distrust, contempt—and infidelity.”

His expression began to change.

I took a step toward him. “You saw my mother. You
know
how unhappy and how unwell she is. I lived every day with the evidence before my eyes of what happens to people when they are in that sort of marriage. And I vowed that no matter what, it would not happen to me.”

He bit his lip. “James loves you. And he's a good man.”

I stared. “He told you?”

“He didn't need to.”

I took a deep breath. “Yes, James is a good man. But really, what sort of favor would I be doing him, accepting his proposal when I love you?”

I could see him wavering. Hope and joy sparked in his eyes, though his face was still rigid with unhappiness.

My god, how I loved him, and how I wanted to erase that hard set to his mouth!

And I knew how to do it.

“By the way, you wouldn't just be getting me,” I said. “You'd be getting Athena, too.”

He looked at me oddly. “What?”

“She probably won't like you much,” I said, making a show of my regret. “She might even try to knock you down. But I won't go without her.”

His eyebrows rose. “Is she—I beg your pardon—is she—your maid?”

I gave him a sly, sideways look. “My horse.”

“Oh!” His eyes widened briefly, and then his mouth twitched into his half-smile, and his voice held the shade of a laugh. “Out of curiosity, how much does it cost to ship a horse to America?”

“I don't know for certain, but I can cover her passage as well as my own.” My chin tilted up, and my voice became matter-of-fact. “I've three hundred and fifty pounds, left to me in trust by my uncle Charles. And it's truly mine, Paul. It's not tied to me staying here in England, or marrying, or anything at all.”

“Three hundred and fifty pounds,” he repeated, with a wondering shake of his head. I knew what he was thinking—it was as much as he'd earn in two years. “But compared to what you
could
have, it's nothing.”

My feet moved of their own accord to bring me to within his arm's reach. “But it
is
nothing unless you take me with you.
Everything's
nothing—unless I'm with you. Don't you see?” Tears were pricking at the corner of my eyes, and I felt an ache in my throat that I didn't even try to swallow down.

“Elizabeth—”

“I love you.”
The tears slid onto my cheeks. “Even if my dowry were completely restored, and my mother cared about me—I'd
still
leave it all, if it meant I could be with you—and
don't
tell me my family will disapprove—I
know
they will, horribly—and I'm sorry about it, but I don't care—I swear I
don't
—”

Then his arms came around me, and he was kissing my face, my hair, my brow, my mouth, all the while murmuring my name again and again, amidst words of love and longing, endearments and promises, that I'd never heard before, never that way, and never for me.

It was the sharp caw of a pigeon on the windowsill that startled us apart and broke our embrace. There it sat, peering at us, its purplish-gray feathers ruffled by the wind, its yellow eyes unblinking.

“We've been caught,” Paul said, a laugh low in his voice, before he went back to kissing me.

But he was wrong.

We weren't caught. We were free.

I've taken some liberties with my historical details of Victorian England, but with regard to Victorian railways and the medical profession, much of what is represented in this novel is true. With doctors and surgeons as respected as they are now, it is hard to imagine that they were considered quacks, charlatans, and butchers as late as the 1890s, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a medical man and author of the famous “Sherlock Holmes” stories, declared he would grow a beard in the hopes that it would make patients take him more seriously.

In 1830, seven years before Victoria became Queen, the very first commercial railway ran the short distance between Liverpool and Manchester. By the 1840s, a railway mania had seized England, with unscrupulous men luring people to invest in railway companies that had not laid a single track. Of the thousands of railways proposed, only hundreds were built, but England was changed forever. The railway altered everything from the way time was told to what people ate to the way wars were waged. To return to Jane Austen's England of the early 1800s would be like us returning to the days before the Internet.

Because the railways were a new industry, many were built without proper safety precautions. By the 1860s, dozens of horrifying railway disasters had killed and maimed passengers, or left them with bizarre symptoms such as paralysis, sleeplessness, and tremors (like those we'd now associate with post-traumatic stress disorder). The 1870s in particular saw a rash of terrible accidents; the worst of them include the 1874 disaster at Shipton-on-Cherwell on the Great Western Railway, in which thirty-four were killed and sixty-nine injured; the Abbotts Ripton disaster of 1876 (fourteen killed in a rear-end collision); the head-on collision at Thorpe in 1874 (twenty-five killed, seventy-five injured); the Bo'ness Junction collision in 1874 (sixteen killed); the Wigan rail crash in 1873 (thirteen killed, thirty injured); the Stairfoot rail accident in 1870 (fifteen killed, fifty-nine injured); the accident at Brockley Whins in 1870 (five killed, fifty-seven injured); the Newark rail crash in 1870 (eighteen killed, forty-one injured); and the Tay Bridge disaster in 1879, when during a gale, the bridge fell from underneath the train and seventy-five people were killed. The disaster I describe is based upon the 1865 disaster near Shrewsbury. But this story is a work of fiction, and you will not find the area of Levlinshire on any map of Victorian England.

As for the regulation of railways, a series of nine separate Regulation Acts were passed between 1840 and 1893. The two regulatory agencies in my book, the Bureau of Railway Security and the Commission for Safety, are fictitious, but there was a Railway Department of the Board of Trade established in 1840 for the purpose of overseeing issues concerning railways. In 1846, the government changed, and a new body, the Railway Commissioners, was established in its place. It was in turn dissolved in 1851 and the Railway Department of the Board of Trade was reestablished; it operated until 1919.

As the character James Isslin explains, Lord Campbell's Act was passed in 1846 with the purpose of compensating the families of someone who died (particularly a railway employee); later, the law was expanded so that injured passengers could sue the railways for damages—so long as they could prove in court that the injury was real and “organic” (that is, tied to a specific bodily organ). With it began a wave of tort litigation and questions about the price that could be placed on pain and suffering. Medical men were called upon to explain whether individuals were truly injured or merely faking their pain to extort money. The railway surgeon John Eric Erichsen, who appears in this novel, was one of these doctors; he wrote his first edition of the handbook,
On Concussion of the Spine,
in 1866. For this novel, I have drawn on his book, as well as Parliamentary Reports, articles and letters in the
Times
(London), articles from the medical journal the
Lancet;
John Charles Hall's
Medical Evidence in Railway Accidents
(1868); Allan McLane Hamilton's
Railway and Other Accidents with Relation to Injury and Disease of the Nervous System. A Book for Court Use
(1904); the article “Effect of Railways on Health” (
Cornhill Magazine
6, 1862); Charles Dickens's letters to his friend Frank Beard on the Staplehurst Accident and Dickens's papers, including “Railway Nightmares” in his weekly journal
Household Words
of November 13, 1858, and his postscript to
Our Mutual Friend
(1864–65), which he penned shortly after the Staplehurst crash. In my research, I consulted many books on railways, especially L. T. C. Rolt,
Red for Danger: The Classic History of British Railway Disasters;
Henry Grote Lewin,
The Railway Mania and Its Aftermath;
R. W. Kostal,
Law and English Railway Capitalism 1825–1875;
Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century;
Adrian Vaughan,
Railwaymen, Politics & Money: The Great Age of Railways in Britain;
and
The Oxford Companion to British Railway History,
edited by Jack Simmons and Gordon Biddle. I was inspired by Victorian novels about railways including Mrs. Henry Wood's
East Lynne
(1861) and
Oswald Cray
(1862), Dickens's
Dombey and Son
(1848), Wilkie Collins's
No Name
(1862), and Anthony Trollope's
The Way We Live Now
(1875). My sadistic Dr. Wharton Sinkler was a real person, and he did wield a hot poker in the courtroom, although he lived in the 1890s in America. But he was too good to leave out.

A brief note on the rules governing women and property. For much of the nineteenth century, a woman of any class could not own property; under the system of “coverture,” upon marriage, her dowry (if she had one) and her possessions became the property of her husband. In 1870 (four years before the action in this novel takes place) the first Married Women's Property Act was proposed, which gave lower class women the right to hold their earnings. A second act was passed in 1882 that broadened the scope of the first; now, married women could retain control over their property as a “separate interest.” The special provision that Uncle Charles makes for Elizabeth in his will was not uncommon; upper class families could get around conventional coverture by making special provisions for ladies, to keep the money out of their husbands' hands, if the family deemed it prudent.