Chapter One
Halifax Nova Scotia, July 1876
* * *
Madeline Murray hated crowds even more than a dog-eared book or small talk with strangers while trying to buy sugar at Kenny’s Dry Goods. And yet here she was, standing in MacAskill’s bookshop, with two of her Everwell companions, Rimple Jones and Elouise Ashe, being jostled and squeezed amongst the horde of readers eager to buy copies of Over the Ocean: Or, Sights and Scenes in Foreign Lands and have them signed by the author himself.
Normally spending a day surrounded by books was not a chore, but today was not a normal day.
Well, not entirely normal.
When one had to switch out a counterfeit copy of a rare—and rather expensive—book with a real one, sacrifices had to be made. Particularly when that sacrifice involved the wellbeing of Mrs. Amelia Cornish, the latest client of The Everwell Society of Scandalous Spinsters and Wayward Women. A charlatan had convinced Mrs. Cornish that her prized copy of William Blake’s Poetical Sketches was a fake and had offered to take it off her hands for a meagre sum. The very idea that a reprobate would cheat a good-hearted soul like Mrs. Cornish out of a family heirloom—and that heirloom being a book—was enough to convince Maddy to brave the bookshop on the single busiest day of the year. So here she was, enduring the endless sideways glances as a woman who, in the words of her mother, had been cursed with far too much height, hips far too broad, and hair far too red to ever to attract the good opinion of a man.
Not that Maddy ever needed one. What had Jane Austen written once upon a time? What are men to rocks and mountains? Elizabeth may have found her match in the imperious Mr. Darcy, but Maddy couldn’t help but wonder if Mary Bennett didn’t have the right of it in the end.
After all, there were flowers and books. Flowers came in endless variety. Some grew happily with little fuss or care at all, like dandelions, Queen Anne’s lace, and Forget-Me-Nots. Others demanded particular attention. Dahlias and Delphiniums were fussy about soil and moisture. Rhododendrons needed to be sheltered from too much sun and wind. And her roses—they were the most demanding of all.
Books had far fewer requirements, but neither books or flowers expected anything from her except a little attention and her time. A rose didn’t care if her skirts were not of the latest fashion. A book did not concern itself that she might have eaten one too many of Rimple Jones’ delicious scones. And neither demanded that she smile.
Except today, when a book required her to put on a fashionable walking gown and venture into a crowded bookshop, her normally unruly hair pinned into an elegant chignon. Maddy hadn’t had an elegant day in her life. Elouise had come to assist with today’s job, using her singular good looks and natural ease to distract anyone from paying too close attention to Maddy as she made the switch. Rimple came simply because she was Rimple, curious almost to a fault, and fascinated by the world and everything in it.
“This place is an absolute crush!” Rimple whispered, her lilting Welsh accent barely audible over the din of the crowd.
“Of course it is,” Elouise chimed in, turning her practiced eye across the room before flashing a dazzling smile back at Maddy and Rimple. “It’s perfect.”
Using the occasion of the book signing had been purposeful. The bookshop attendants would be busy with the unusual number of customers and the requirements of their author, leaving Maddy to find the volume in question and switch it out for the fake copy in her bag.
“It’s not going to be on these shelves,” she said, murmuring to her companions. “That book is worth a small fortune. It’s going to be in that locked cabinet, behind the counter.”
“If only Gemma were here,” Rimple said, referring to Gemma Webber, Everwell’s sleight-of-hand master.
“She’s helping Jeremy host a luncheon,” Elouise replied. “Right now that’s probably the most important job she can do for us today.”
Maddy exchanged a look with Rimple, whose seemingly perpetual smile had just dimmed. Gemma had married Jeremy Webber, a former colonel of the British army, who worked as the Private Secretary for the Lieutenant Governor. The normally shy spinster—or former spinster, Maddy reminded herself—was now wife to a man with a very public role. Since their fateful meeting, they’d encountered disturbing rumours about The Everwell Society for the Benefit of Sorrowful Spinsters and Woeful Widows — the public face of The Everwell Society. Aside from Everwell’s rather scandalous mission of educating girls from all social classes and races, and providing emergency shelter for women in distress, there were whispers amongst that the upper echelons of Halifax society, sitting in their lush parlours and private clubs, of a den of lady thieves working out of old Georgian manor.
Of course the rumours, or at least some of them, were true.
“Plan A, or Plan B?” Maddy asked, eager to get on with their mission.
“Plan A is less risky,” Rimple suggested. “Especially if someone decides I should leave.”
Something fierce flared in Maddy’s chest as she scanned the room, looking for even the slightest hint of a threat. The daughter of a Welsh Engineer and a half-English, half-Indian mathematician, Rimple’s golden-brown skin subjected her to looks that ranged from curiosity to remarks of outright hostility. It didn’t stop her, of course, because Rimple seemed to have a bottomless well of confidence, no doubt due to living half her life under the guardianship of two of the most self-assured and powerful women Maddy had ever the privilege to know. But it didn’t make it any less taxing on Rimple, nor any more safe. And Maddy would die a thousand deaths rather than see harm of any kind come to Rimple, Elouise, or the others at Everwell.
Elouise, aware of her ability to dazzle people with a smile so bright the sun might seem dim in its presence, stayed close by. “No one is going to even suggest it,” she said. Elouise was a master of the confidence game. “Rimple, let’s get in line. Maddy, you get in position. Once you get the clerk to open the cabinet, wait for our signal.”
“And if it’s not there?” Maddy asked.
“Then we go to Plan C.”
Eloise took Rimple by the arm and escorted her into the line that snaked through the store while Maddy approached the counter lined with customers and one harried clerk.
“Excuse me,” she said, waving as politely as she could muster, trying to catch the clerk’s eye. His gaze brushed past her as if she were invisible, moving to assist one customer on her left, before then being so ever helpful to another on her right.
“Excuse me,” she repeated, a little louder, after the clerk had passed over her once more. Not that she could imagine he hadn’t heard her the first time or ignored her subtle waves to draw his attention to her. “Can I?—”
“The line starts back there,” called out an annoyed customer from somewhere behind her. “Wait your turn.”
Maddy looked over her shoulder, looking past the irate man behind her, to where Elouise and Rimple were already making their way to the front of the autograph line. This wasn’t going to work if she couldn’t get the man to see her. How could he miss her? She was taller than half the men in the shop by at least three inches. She blew out a low breath.
