Excerpt from Flight of the Wild Swan by Melissa Pritchard, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Delirium

35 South Street
Mayfair
London 1877

She wakes in stale darkness, sweat-soaked, freezing. The same nightmare, always. A common grave, hundreds of the dead, their arms tightening around her, pulling her down. An indistinct murmur of voices. Some still in uniform, most writhing, naked. She cannot save them. Cannot save herself.

This time the waking is different. This time she is dying. She is sure of it. The nurse, Anna, will find her in the morning.

Then what?

Vultures descending. Family first. Spying. Searching through her things. Then the press. Speculating. Digging. She hasn't much. Papers. Paperwork, journals, letters. As she likes to say, enough writing to cover Australia.

Some things should never be read.

I stand at the Altar of these murdered men and while I live, I fight their cause.

Let them read that.

God spoke to me and called me to His service. What form this service was to take the voice did not say.

That, too.

Kindness to sick man, woman, and child came in with Christ.

The beginning of my story.

Three things all but destroyed the army in the Crimea—ignorance, incapacity, and useless rules.

A tragic fact.

But it all takes too long. She becomes confused, feverish, rummaging through papers, journals, letters, unable to decide what and how much of herself to burn. Until the sky lightens, until the nurse puts her to bed and goes to find the doctor, she will feed more and more of herself into the fire. Stupid pieces, damaging, irrelevant. Ravings. Infatuations. Master—imagine having called him that! Bitter outpourings against God, men, men's government, men's wars, all of it. Bile that had to come out, put where she put everything, saving every word. On paper. To be used against her once she is gone.

Keep the scientist, the statistician, the nurse. Preserve the myth. History a jumble of half-truths anyway. Let the fire eat her rage, her failures. Let her become what each generation needs her to be.

A light to lead others.

The rest worthless.

I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my cats.

My favorite.

PART ONE

I Am Educated

Lea Hurst

Derbyshire, England
1827-1836

Ensnared

I run toward the piteous cries, my boots weighing me down, small stones I've collected for Papa clatting against one another in my pocket.

It had not been my intent to rescue a thing. In the library this morning, Papa had let me hold a new fossil from his collection, an ammonite from Lyme Regis. When I'd asked how I might find fossils of my own, he suggested I first scout the woodlands, develop an eye for unusual stones. Father's library, an oak- paneled room smelling of tobacco, cloves, and bergamot, of dust and dead insects clinging to heavy folds of maroon drapery, is a shadowy, crammed place where rare books are piled up, haphazardly shelved, left open on glass-topped naturalist's cabinets. Besides the nursery I share with my sister, it is my favorite of the many rooms at Lea Hurst. Setting the ammonite back in its precise place amid a neat row of labeled fossils, Papa added, "After you've found your stones, Flo, bring them to me; then you may choose from among my Midlands brachiopods."

I have collections of coins, seashells, wax dolls. I've a cemetery trove of harvest mice, a baby wren, pink-skinned and naked of feathers, a blackbird, two halves of a grass snake, a natterjack toad, a striped brown lizard. Papa collects hundreds of rare books, plant and insect specimens, fossils. I covet his Jurassic ammonite from Lyme Regis, its green-tinged, coarsely pitted spiral.

So, on the governess's day off, when Parthe and I are meant to be resting before tea, I get up. Making as little sound as possible, clutching my boots to my chest, I steal down the back stairway, servants' stairs we are never to use, drag open the iron-studded door, slip into the bleached glare and chapel-like hush of a Sunday afternoon in Derbyshire. On the granite steps, I lace up the iron-lined boots—because my ankles are weak, I am made to wear them—and set off down one of several footpaths winding deep into Lea Hurst's woodlands.

Excerpted from Flight of the Wild Swan by Melissa Pritchard. Copyright © 2024 by Melissa Pritchard. Excerpted by permission of Bellevue Literary Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.