Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

One

Morning

April 7, 1898

Whitehall, London

It was just one little riot.

Eleanora Mallory certainly hadn’t meant for it to be a riot. She had gone to the gates of the Palace of Westminster, home of the two houses of Parliament, for a peaceful demonstration in support of women’s suffrage. The great Gothic facade of the building rose up behind her in an imposing confection of skinny windows and unnecessary spires.

Inside those walls, the fate of the nation was decided—a fate that Ellie and every other woman in England was entirely, unjustly excluded from.

Ellie had painted a sign on some nailed together slats of wood that she had liberated from an empty crate at her place of employment. It read: United Against Tyranny!

She had mulled over the exclamation point for a bit, but had decided that it was quite justified given a thousand centuries or so of systematic oppression.

The organizers of the demonstration had instructed her to hold up her sign and project deep, abiding scorn at the black-suited Members of Parliament who made their way through the gates. Ellie’s dignified bearing would shower shame upon the men walking past her—men who refused to grant her the basic human right of self-determination in matters of politics.

Not that shame had been getting the suffrage movement very far. The men in the suits seemed to lack that particular piece of the emotional spectrum.

Most of the members strolled past the protesters as though the women weren’t even there. Others busied themselves by rattling off self-important instructions to scurrying underlings.

As Ellie watched the parade of gentlemen walk into their looming building without sparing her and her fellow protesters so much as a glance, her frustration grew until she was gritting her teeth against it.

A pair of MPs with overly tight waistcoats chortled at the demonstration, nudging each other in the ribs. The woman beside Ellie lowered her sign a bit. Her shoulders pulled in as though she were slightly wilted.

Another man nearly walked into the lady beside Ellie, as his nose was pressed to the pages of his newspaper. He looked alarmed when he realized that the suffragists were there, and then sighed as though the whole thing were a bit of bother.

of the demonstrators behind Ellie whispered softly. The muffled words were heavy with demoralization. A colleague shushed her gently.

Ellie held her back straighter. She hefted her sign higher and tried to look even more shame-provokingly dignified.

She was managing it very nicely until a pair of aristocratic bucks in flash waistcoats stopped in front of the suffragists.

“Which one of ‘em would you like to bring you your slippers tonight, Atkins?” the first asked.

“Don’t know that I’d let any of them near my slippers,” Atkins replied. “The look of them might put me off my port.”

He followed this with a theatrical shudder.

of the ladies beside Ellie flinched as though struck. Another looked close to tears, but she held up her head in spite of it.

The simmering feeling in Ellie’s chest grew hotter… and tighter.

“Make sure you’re all home in time to put the tea on!” Atkins’ companion called out.

The two men broke into a chorus of raucous laughter as they turned to stroll away.

Ellie snapped.

Somehow, the sign flew from her hand. It soared across the pavement and struck Atkins firmly in his black-suited back. He stumbled forward, irritably adjusting his hat.

“I say, now!” he protested.

Whatever it was Atkins planned to say was cut off as Ellie roared out, raising a fist to the sky.

“To the gates, sisters!” she shouted. “We shall not let them pass!”

The words sparked through the demonstration’s careful facade of dignity, breaking open the roiling emotions that hid beneath. The women around Ellie ignited.

A group of the demonstrators surged forward, charging the enormous wrought iron gates that separated the public pavement from the palace yard. The press of women shoved the heavy doors forward, bringing them to a resounding close.

Now that the MPs were entirely blocked from getting inside, they actually began to pay attention to what was going on.

There were surprised exclamations of Good Lord! and Rather unexpected, wot? A few of the men managed to reach around the white clad bodies of the suffragists to grasp the gates and give the bars a shake. The iron grid behind Ellie’s back rattled alarmingly even as she twined her arms through either side of it.

“We can’t hold it closed!” one of her fellow demonstrators cried out.

The gate behind Ellie lurched, knocking off her hat.

“This might help!” someone in the crowd shouted.

A familiar figure pressed forward through the melee, holding up a set of thick gray chains that ended in sturdy manacles.

Earlier, Ellie had seen Miss Reynolds holding the chains in her upraised hands as a prop. At the time, Ellie had thought them quite effective as a piece of symbolic theater. Based on the solid thunk they made as Miss Reynolds approached, the metal links were more than purely decorative in function.

“I can use these to secure one of us to the opening,” Miss Reynolds called out breathlessly as the iron clanked in her hands. “But fair warning, I have no idea where the key has gone off to. I wasn’t exactly expecting to—”

“Bugger off, you daft witches!” a voice called angrily from the cluster of politicians.

In the face of the flood of verbal bile as the bars jerked with frenzied force behind her back, Ellie felt a remarkable sense of calm wash over her.

“Good morning, Florabelle,” she said firmly through the outraged male faces pressing toward her. “You may affix the manacles to me.”

The following afternoon, Ellie watched the relentless gray rain wash down the high, narrow windows of the Public Record Office as she waited to be fired.

The PRO was charged with cataloging and archiving official government documents for the entirety of the United Kingdom. Ellie had been told many times that she ought to be grateful for the opportunity to work there… despite the fact that she had scored nearly perfectly on her civil service exams and was eminently qualified for the position. After all, she was the only woman thus far in the PRO’s history to be offered the position of archivist instead of being relegated to the typing pool.

Of course, even though Ellie had been working in the great, gray monolith of a building for the last three years, she was still regularly stopped in the halls and directed to the typing pool rather than the archivists’ room. There was one gentleman, Mr. Ruddingford, who had very courteously directed her to the typing pool no less than twenty-six times. There was no deliberate malice in it. During each and every encounter, he simply neglected to bother remembering who she was.

On this particular rainy afternoon, Ellie was not in the archivists’ room. She sat in an uncomfortable chair in the office of Mr. Charles Henbury, Assistant Keeper of the Rolls—Ellie’s supervisor, who at any moment would enter the office and gleefully issue her notice of dismissal.

All for the teensy bother of having been arrested.

Her reflection stared waveringly back at her from the rain-streaked glass, sporting brown hair of a standard hue and hazel eyes, which were currently a bit more gray than green. The neat spray of freckles across her nose was accented by a colorful bruise on her cheekbone. Ellie had acquired said bruise when a flailing, portly baron tripped over the leg of a policeman and fell into her where she hung at the gates.

A framed certificate with a gilded seal and a tricolor ribbon hung on the thick, gray stones behind Mr. Henbury’s desk. It was signed by the Master of the Rolls, a silver-haired gentleman who was both the ceremonial head of the PRO and the second-most-senior judge in the kingdom. The certificate honored Mr. Henbury for exceptional work compiling a complete descriptive catalog of the ancient deeds among the PRO’s holdings.

Mr. Henbury had not had much to do with it. Ellie had compiled the catalog, and had done quite a bit of work stabilizing the moldering and irreplaceable documents while she was at it. For his part, Mr. Henbury had ignored her requests for necessary supplies and occasionally interrupted her to demand that she fetch him biscuits.

(Mr. Henbury did not ask the male archivists to fetch him biscuits.)

Mr. Henbury had also ignored Ellie’s concerns about the level of humidity in Room B14, where the deeds were stored. Several of the fourteenth-century parchments were already damaged by mildew. Finally, Ellie had asked her colleague, Mr. Barker, to bring the issue to Mr. Henbury’s desk. Though Mr. Barker was unfortunate enough to be a socialist, he was still a man, and at last the order for a new ventilation shaft was put in.

The dreary halls of the PRO were not what Ellie had dreamed of when she had fought her way into University College, achieving the highest possible marks on her entrance exams. She had elected to focus on the study of Ancient History, picking up additional classes in Greek and Latin. She had taught herself to read Egyptian hieroglyphs in her spare time.

Ellie had done all of it in order to prepare herself for a career as an archaeologist. Her stepbrother Neil—now Dr. Fairfax, she reminded herself—had been more or less handed that life on a silver platter when he had graduated from Cambridge. As Ellie sat in Mr. Henbury’s office and watched the rain streak down the glass, Neil was at the ancient and fascinating necropolis of Saqqara in Egypt, excavating a very promising eighteenth-dynasty tomb cluster.

She closed her eyes and imagined the feel of hot sun on her skin as she brushed the debris of centuries away from ancient stones.

Uncovering knowledge lost for millennia was all that Ellie had ever wanted. It had been a ten-year-old Ellie, not Neil, who had come up with the idea of excavating the sedimentation layers under the roses at their semi-detached house in Canonbury. Ellie could still remember her stepmother’s screech of dismay. Florence had not been appeased by Ellie’s insistence that she would put the plants back once she had determined that there were no indications of a Roman camp or Medieval settlement beneath them.

At that tender age, it had never occurred to Ellie that the life she wanted was an impossibility—that no amount of intelligence and determination would ever overcome the handicap of her gender.

Now aged a ripe twenty-four, Ellie knew the limits the world imposed upon women all too well. Working as an archivist had at least allowed her to get her hands on history, if not quite in the way that she had dreamed.

Now, it seemed even that would be taken away from her. She wasn’t entirely certain what would be left once it was gone.

Ellie knew what her stepmother would say… because Florence had said it, more or less once a month for the last three years.

It is far past time you got yourself a husband.

Ellie didn’t want a husband. Marriage would mean the end of any occupation for her besides managing the household—a fate even less desirable than being eaten alive by a boa constrictor.

But what was the alternative? Only teaching, the last resort of most women unfortunate enough to be educated. The thought was more depressing than the weather.

Ellie glanced up at the clock. Mr. Henbury was running late. That was hardly surprising. The man couldn’t even be bothered to arrive on time to lay her off—a moment she was certain he had been eagerly anticipating for years.

Ellie eyed the pile of documents on Mr. Henbury’s desk. The polished surface was almost invisible under a mountain of teetering files and bundles of loose papers. Mr. Henbury’s shelves weren’t much better. Books and files were stuffed onto them in a shocking state of disorganization.

Mr. Henbury was ostensibly responsible for sorting out the fate of any items the archivists weren’t sure how to categorize. As he was terrible at it, the other archivists usually came to Ellie first with their questions about catalog numbers or difficulties translating Old French.

Ellie had prevented quite a few tough nut cases from landing on Mr. Henbury’s messy desk. She allowed herself a small burst of satisfaction at the thought of how much more work he’d be stuck with once she was gone.

Mr. Henbury wasn’t particularly keen on working.

Rising from her chair, Ellie risked a quick glance into the hall. It was empty. Satisfied that she had a moment or two before Mr. Henbury entered wielding the ax of dismissal, she slipped over to the desk and plopped herself down in his chair with a happy little sigh of rebellion.

It should have been her chair, really. She certainly never would’ve let the assistant keeper’s desk become such a muddle.

Ellie glanced idly through the papers, searching for anything her colleagues might have sent along for Mr. Henbury to examine. Such odds and ends occasionally made for interesting reading.

She plucked up a set of agricultural reports and frowned at them. They clearly should have been filed within Section DD 168 over in Room 207.

Shelf A, she thought distantly as she reached for a piece of notepaper. Box 281C.

Ellie caught herself, stifling a huff of frustration. Mr. Henbury was happy enough for her to do his work for him, but he would raise a holy furor should he discover she’d had the temerity to sit at his desk.

Though it pained her, she refrained from noting the proper catalog reference for the reports. Instead, she turned her attention to a promising-looking ledger sandwiched in the middle of one of Mr. Henbury’s stacks. It refused to come loose from the paper mountain until Ellie gave it a more forceful tug—and sent a tower of files sliding to the floor.

“Drat!” she muttered, hurrying around the desk to tidy up the mess.

It would be just her luck for Mr. Henbury to find her rifling through his papers on the floor.

She quickly gathered up an assortment of eighteenth-century shipping logs—CC 467, she noted absently—and then paused as she realized that something lay beneath them. Clutching the thick bundle of documents to her chest, Ellie reached out with her free hand and retrieved it.

It was a black book, moderate in dimensions but fairly stout, tied closed with a faded black ribbon. Ellie recognized it as a psalter—an early printed book of psalms. Calf binding, Ellie thought as she turned it over in her hands. Mid-seventeenth century.

A psalter was most certainly not a government record, and therefore had no business being on the assistant keeper’s desk—or in the PRO at all, really. How it had come to be there at all was a mystery.

Most of the mysteries Ellie encountered in the records office weren’t particularly alluring. She was far more likely to stumble across the mystery of why some long-dead clerk had decided to add extraneous vowels to all of his adverbs or why another had chosen to file a count of the royal herds alongside a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Ellie hefted the volume thoughtfully in her hand. It felt oddly heavy.

Footsteps sounded as Mr. Henbury’s voice echoed from down the hall.

“Tell Edwards that there will be no extension. The calendar will be done by next Friday or I will find someone else to enjoy his position!”

Ellie hurriedly shoved the tumbled files onto Mr. Henbury’s desk, then gave them a quick and uncertain adjustment. Had she set them back at the right angle?

Oh—why was she worrying? Mr. Henbury wasn’t going to notice.

She paused at the psalter. It itched under her fingers, begging to be explored. Before Ellie could think further about it, the stout little book had slipped into the pocket of her skirt. She dashed to her seat and quickly arranged herself as the footsteps neared and Mr. Henbury entered the room.

He was a shorter man, and decidedly balding—however much he tried to hide it by combing the remaining hair across his forehead. It was secured there with a generous quantity of pomade that gave off a special glimmer when Mr. Henbury stood beneath an electric light, as he did now.

“Miss Mallory,” he announced. “I suppose you must be wondering why you have been summoned here today.”

Mr. Henbury had taken on an air of stuffy self-importance. It was one of his favorite airs. Ellie schooled her face into a placid blandness that concealed her frustration.

“I am sure I could not possibly guess, Mr. Henbury,” she replied tiredly.

Henbury straightened his back, puffing his chest out a bit. He believed it made him look authoritative.

“It has come to our attention that you were arrested yesterday afternoon,” he said. “I am sure you must see that such behavior is quite inappropriate for an employee of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office.”

“Is it?” Ellie returned dryly. “I had no idea.”

Mr. Henbury didn’t respond. He wasn’t really listening to her anyway.

“I am afraid I must therefore inform you that your employment here at the PRO is to be terminated, effective immediately,” he continued. “You will collect any personal items from your desk over the next hour and remove yourself from the premises.”

“No letter of reference, then?" Ellie asked in a bland tone.

Mr. Henbury blinked at her, startled.

A reference letter?” he echoed. “You were arrested!"

“Just one little arrest,” Ellie offered cheerfully, “which they aren’t even pressing charges for. It’s not as though I was denying half the population of the United Kingdom one of their most basic and essential civil rights, consigning them to a life of virtual slavery thinly disguised as ‘domestic bliss’ and forbidding them from any meaningful or profitable employment.”

“You don’t require employment,” Mr. Henbury spluttered. “That’s what you get a husband for!”

Ellie’s fury snapped to life.

“I don’t want a husband,” she seethed, cold and dangerous.

Mr. Henbury opened his mouth to respond—then closed it again, blinking at her. It seemed he hadn’t the foggiest notion of what to say to that.

“In any event,” he went on a bit more loudly, “here is your notice.” He took a neat white envelope from his pocket and held it out to her. “Best of luck to you.”

Ellie wanted to throttle him. She wanted to scream with pure outrage—not just at her dismissal, which she had fully and grimly anticipated since the moment she had been dragged from the gates of Parliament by a pair of uniformed constables, but at all of it. The open disdain of her PRO colleagues. The snide comments in the halls of the university. The insidious, affectionate, unrelenting pressure from even those who loved her.

The dream that she had ached for since childhood—the one the world relished telling her, over and over again, could never be hers.

Ellie calmly extended her hand, taking the white envelope from Mr. Henbury’s grasp and slipping it into her pocket.

“Mr. Henbury,” she acknowledged evenly.

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Henbury replied, waving her away as he turned back to his desk. “Oh, and do ask one of the ladies in the typing pool to run me up a couple of biscuits on your way out.”