Chapter 1 – The Old King’s Road

The carriage hit a rut deep enough to rearrange Florence’s teeth, but she couldn’t stop smiling.

She adjusted her grip on the satchel in her lap. It was a battered leather thing, overstuffed, the buckle straining against a change of clothes and a crumpled acceptance letter she had folded and unfolded so many times the creases were beginning to tear. She held it the way other people held infants. Carefully. With both hands. As though the road itself might reach up and snatch it.

“You’re going to vibrate right off the bench if you don’t settle down,” Alice said.

She was leaning against the wooden slats of the carriage wall, legs crossed at the ankles, watching the countryside pass with the expression of someone enduring a favour. She hadn’t volunteered her surname. She hadn’t volunteered much at all, beyond a seat preference and a way of occupying silence that made it feel like a closed door.

Florence tucked a loose strand of brown hair behind her ear. “Thomas says the smog is so thick you can taste the coal on your teeth.”

“Thomas.”

“My brother. He’s been in Dunwick almost five years now. Works for the government.” Florence said it with a quiet, reflexive pride, the kind that came from repeating the fact to herself at night in a house that was too empty. “He sends letters. Long ones, when he remembers. Short ones, when he doesn’t. Last month he wrote three pages about a pie.”

Alice’s mouth twitched. It was not quite a smile. “I’m sure it was a remarkable pie.”

“He said it changed his life. He underlined it twice.” Florence looked down at her hands. They were surprisingly soft for a baker’s hands. There were years of kneading dough, yes, but also years of flour and oil and a deliberate gentleness—she had always known she’d need them for finer work. The ink from the registration forms was still lodged under two of her nails. “I’m going to study at the University. Medicine.”

Alice glanced at her. A beat. “Medicine.”

“I want to be a doctor.”

“That’s grim work. You’ll spend half your time elbow-deep in strangers and the other half being blamed when they die anyway.”

Florence had heard variations of this from every adult in Briar’s Crossing. She had a response for it, polished smooth by repetition, but what came out instead was quieter than the rehearsed version.

“Two years ago, a fever came through our town. It moved fast. By the time anyone with medical training arrived from the city, we’d already started digging.” She smoothed the strap of her satchel with her thumb. “I sat with people. That’s all I could do. Sit with them and watch and not know a single useful thing. I decided I wouldn’t do that again.”

The carriage wheels found a stretch of even road, and the rattling softened to a hum. Alice was looking out the window. Her reflection in the glass was sharper than her expression. Her jaw was set, and her eyes were fixed on a point in the middle distance that had nothing to do with the treeline.

“You’re odd,” Alice said. It was not an insult. It was an observation, delivered with faint puzzlement, as though Florence were a species she hadn’t expected to find in the wild. “Most girls our age are heading to the city to find a husband and not much else.”

“What about you?” Florence asked. “Why Dunwick?”

Alice’s fingers, which had been tapping a rhythm against her knee, stopped. “I’m looking for a change of scenery.”

“From where?”

“Somewhere scenic.” She shifted in her seat, a small, precise adjustment that angled her body a fraction away from the question. “The air at home was stifling. My family and I had a disagreement about… the direction of my life. I chose a different direction. Here I am.”

Florence studied her. Alice sat the way Florence imagined diplomats sat: spine straight, chin level, every angle considered. Her clothes were plain but well-cut, the fabric a grade above what you’d find in a market town. Her vowels had edges that she was trying, not entirely successfully, to sand down.

Florence did not mention any of this.

“Well,” Florence said, “you have me now. Thomas arranged a boarding house. Mrs. Gable’s, on Baker Street. He says she’s strict but fair and the porridge is acceptable, which from Thomas means it’s probably very good. You could take a room there too, if you wanted. It’s cheap, and—”

The carriage lurched violently to the left.

Florence slammed into Alice, her satchel flying from her lap. She heard the horses before she understood what was happening. It was a raw, animal shriek, hooves scrabbling against gravel, the carriage frame groaning as though the wood itself were in pain. The world tilted. Something heavy cracked beneath them, and the vehicle slewed sideways and stopped with a jolt that threw them both against the far wall.

Florence gasped. “A wheel?”

Alice was already at the window frame, her knuckles white on the wood, her eyes narrow.

“No.” Her voice had changed. The arch boredom was gone, replaced by something flat and tight and alert. “Not a wheel.”

“Step down!” The voice came from outside. It was gruff, commanding, and loud enough to cut through the wind and the horses’ panic. “Step down or we fill the box with lead!”

Florence’s hands found her satchel on the floor. She clutched it against her chest without thinking. The acceptance letter, the change of clothes, and the sum total of her future were crumpled against her ribs. She looked at Alice.

Alice had raised her hands. Slowly. Her jaw was set in a way that made the muscles stand out beneath the skin.

“Do as he says,” Alice murmured. “Don’t run. Don’t fight. Just do exactly what he says.”

The door was wrenched open before they could move. A shotgun barrel came first. It was thrust into the small space like a fist, smelling of spent powder and rust and oily neglect. Hands followed. Rough, calloused, impersonal. They found Florence’s wrist and hauled her out with enough force to bruise, and the gravel came up to meet her knees with a crack that sent pain lancing up both thighs.

The world after that was shouting and hands and dirt.

Florence tried to stand. A shove put her back down. Beside her, Alice was forced to the ground with equal violence, though she managed it differently. She caught her weight in a crouch rather than a sprawl, absorbing the impact with her legs, landing like someone who had been taught how to fall.

Florence did not have time to wonder about that.

A dozen or so minutes later, the excitement of the university felt like something that had happened to a different girl.

The ropes were too tight. That was the only thing Florence allowed herself to focus on. The raw, abrasive bite of hemp against her wrists, the fibers catching and tearing at skin that had never been calloused in the right places, took all her attention. If she focused on the rope, she did not have to focus on anything else.

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She sat in the dirt on the side of the Old King’s Road, her knees drawn to her chest. The grey dress she had ironed that morning—carefully, slowly, with the borrowed flat-iron heated on Mrs. Hensley’s stove, because you did not arrive at the University of Dunwick in a wrinkled dress—was now stained with mud and torn at the hem. The carriage driver lay unconscious by the wheel, a bruise blooming across his temple where the pistol grip had connected. The elderly merchant couple sat a few feet to her left, the wife weeping silently, the husband staring at the ground with the rigid, disconnected composure of a man who had decided that if he did not move, none of this would be real.

The bandit leader paced.

He was lean in the way underfed dogs were lean. He was not starved but stripped, the excess burned away by a life that didn’t allow for it. The greatcoat he wore had once been military issue. The insignia had been torn from the collar, leaving pale, rectangular ghosts in the wool. He moved with the loose, rolling gait of a man comfortable with the weight of a gun on his hip, and when he smiled, it was an exercise in geometry: the mouth moved, but the eyes did not.

“Look at that,” he said, surveying his catch. “Didn’t even waste a bullet.”

Florence squeezed her eyes shut.

“You’re pathetic.”

The words cut through the quiet with the clean, contemptuous precision of a blade drawn across glass. Florence’s eyes snapped open.

Alice was sitting with her hands bound behind her back and dirt smeared across one cheek, and her posture was immaculate. Spine straight. Chin up. She looked like a duchess who had been deposited in the wrong painting and was waiting for someone to correct the error.

“Alice,” Florence whispered. “Please. Don’t.”

“He robbed a carriage,” Alice said. She did not whisper. Her eyes were fixed on the Leader with a steadiness that had nothing to do with courage and everything to do with experience—she had learned, in a life Florence was beginning to suspect was considerably more complicated than advertised, that looking away from dangerous men was worse than looking at them. “A carriage full of unarmed women and the elderly. And now he’s strutting. I’m simply noting the calibre of the accomplishment.”

The Leader stopped pacing. His boots crunched on the gravel as he turned, and the lazy smile settled onto his face like something he kept in a drawer and put on for occasions.

“Got a lot of fire for a little thing.”