The She-Wolf of Edinburgh

Chapter 1 —

The coach smelled of wet wool and other people’s anxiety.

Rowan Cairns had been sitting in it for six hours, watching Scotland change outside the window — the flat farmland giving way to something older, more deliberate, a landscape that had opinions about itself.

The hills darkened as they moved north.

The sky lowered.

By the time they crossed the Water of Leith she could feel Edinburgh before she could see it, a pressure in the air like the city was deciding whether to let her in.

She had forty-three pounds, two changes of clothes, her father’s medical notebook, and a letter she had written and rewritten eleven times to a woman she had never met.

She had read about Sophia Jex-Blake in the Scotsman three weeks ago — the Edinburgh Seven, the university, the fight. She had read it standing in her father’s empty study in Glasgow, surrounded by the books they hadn’t managed to sell yet, and she had thought: that is where I am going.

She had not thought beyond the going. She was better at through than at after.

The coach crossed the North Bridge and Edinburgh opened below her without warning — the Old Town stacked on volcanic rock like it had been built by people who wanted God to see it from a distance, the gothic spires catching what was left of the November light, the closes and wynds dropping away into shadow between the buildings. Gas lamps were already lit along the High Street.

The castle sat above everything, indifferent and enormous.

Something moved in her chest.

Not excitement. Something older than excitement.

Like recognition.

I know you, she thought, though she had never been here before.

She told herself it was the cold.

Surgeons’ Hall was not what she expected. She had imagined a building. What she found was a siege.

Several hundred male students filled the street outside the gates — organized, loud, their breath clouding in the November air, their dark coats and top hats turning the crowd into something that moved like one creature with very poor intentions.

She stood at the edge of it and assessed the situation the way her father had taught her to assess a difficult patient: calmly, completely, without letting what she felt interfere with what she saw.

The gate was shut. Iron bars, eight feet tall, padlocked.

On the other side — the exam hall, the anatomy tables, the examination she had no official right to sit but intended to sit regardless. Somewhere in the crowd or already inside: seven women who had spent a year earning the right to be here and were being denied it by two hundred men and a padlock.

Someone threw something.

She didn’t see what.

She heard the impact and the laughter that followed.

She pushed into the crowd.

It was worse than she’d anticipated and exactly as bad as she’d prepared for.

The bodies were solid and unwilling.

Someone grabbed her arm — she broke the grip with a twist her father had shown her when she was twelve and he had decided that a physician’s daughter in Glasgow needed to know how to manage herself.

Someone’s elbow caught her shoulder. She kept moving.

The gate was the point. Everything else was noise.

She was almost through when she saw him.

He was standing on the steps above the gate, above the crowd, above the whole churning mess of it — tall, dark-coated, completely still in the way that very controlled people are still, as though stillness is a decision they make every moment and renew without effort.

She registered him in fragments: broad shoulders, dark hair pushed back from his face, the particular quality of attention that meant he had been watching her for longer than she’d been watching him.

Silver-grey eyes. Steady as the castle above the city.

He was not helping. He was not threatening. He was watching her with an expression she could not read — something between recognition and calculation, as though she were a variable he had been waiting to see resolve.

Their eyes met for one second through the mob.

She looked away first.

She forced through the gate.

Inside, the exam hall smelled of cold stone and something animal underneath it, something she chose not to examine too closely.

The women of the Edinburgh Seven were already seated — Sophia Jex-Blake at the front, her back straight as a surgical instrument, her expression suggesting that the events of the past hour had confirmed every opinion she had already formed about the world.

Six others beside her, arranged with the specific composure of people who have decided that composure is the sharpest weapon available.

One empty seat.

Rowan took it.

The examiner looked at her.

She looked back at him. He looked at his papers, then at the women, then at his papers again, and began.

She picked up her pen.

The exam was on anatomical structure — she had studied her father’s texts for three weeks in preparation, had memorized diagrams by candlelight in the empty study while the Glasgow house settled around her.

The questions were good questions.

She answered them.

Outside the windows she could still hear the crowd, the occasional impact of something against the gate, the specific sound of organized contempt. She wrote her answers in her best hand and did not look up.

When the examiner called time she set her pen down and looked at what she had written.

It was good work. Her father would have said so in that restrained way he had, the slight nod that meant better than I expected, which from him was the highest possible praise.

I got in, she thought. I sat the exam.

She did not let herself feel it fully yet. Feeling things fully was for after.

She walked out through the gate — open now, the crowd thinned and dispersed into the Edinburgh evening — and into the cold and the gaslight and the smell of the city. She did not look for the man on the steps. She did not look back at all.

Sophia Jex-Blake’s lodgings on Buccleuch Place were everything the Scotsman had not mentioned: warm, slightly chaotic, smelling of tea and ink and the particular industriousness of women who were always working on three things simultaneously.

Sophia herself was smaller than Rowan had imagined — compact, precise, with the eyes of someone who had stopped giving people the benefit of the doubt some years ago and did not miss the habit.

She read Rowan’s letter standing in her own hallway, still in her coat.

She asked four questions. Rowan answered them. Sophia looked at her for a long moment and said: “You have no official standing. If it goes wrong, you don’t exist. Those are the terms.”

“Yes,” Rowan said.

“The room on the top floor is free. Eighteen shillings a month.”

That was it.

That was Edinburgh.

That night Rowan sat at the desk in the top-floor room and looked out over the Edinburgh roofline — the chimneys, the spires, Arthur’s Seat rising dark against the sky to the east, enormous and volcanic and ancient in a way that made the rest of the city look temporary by comparison. The moon was not yet full but it was getting there, and it laid a particular light across the stone that made everything look like it was waiting for something.

She opened her notebook.

At the top of the first page she wrote the date — November 18, 1870 — and then: I got through the gate.

She sat with that for a moment. Then she wrote one more line, smaller, below the first, as though she wasn’t entirely sure she meant to write it at all.

He had silver eyes.

She closed the notebook.

She looked at the city.

The feeling from the bridge came back — that older-than-excitement thing, that sense of being recognized by a place that had no reason to know her.

She had come to Edinburgh for her father’s stolen work. For the research they had taken from him and the reputation they had destroyed and the years he had spent in that Glasgow study becoming smaller than he should have been.

She had come to get it back.

That was the point. That was the only point.

She put the notebook in her bag. She went to bed.

She did not think about the silver eyes again until she was almost asleep, and then she thought about them for a very long time.

Historical Note:

The Surgeons’ Hall Riot depicted in Chapter 1 took place on November 18, 1870.

Sophia Jex-Blake and the Edinburgh Seven were real women who fought for the right to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh.

They passed their examinations, outperformed their male peers, and were expelled anyway when the university’s Court ruled in 1872 that their admission had never been legally valid.

Sophia Jex-Blake qualified as a doctor in 1877 and opened the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women in 1886. Edith Pechey became a pioneering physician in India. The University of Edinburgh did not award degrees to women until 1893.