With four older brothers to help on the farm, my mother had insisted on finding a placement for me in London once I reached the proper age. She knew if I did not leave the countryside at a tender age, I would never see a life outside the pastures and pigpens. My parents had argued about it for months, but my mother would not relent, not even a bit.

The morning of my departure was a tearful, tense one. My father hated to lose two good hands on the farm; my mother hated the separation from her youngest child. “I feel as though I’m slicing off a piece of my heart,” she sobbed, smoothing out the lap quilt she’d just placed into my case. “But I will not let it doom you to a life like mine.”

Our destination was the servant’s registry office. As we rode into town, my mother leaned close, the sadness in her voice now replaced with exhilaration. “You must begin where life has slotted you,” she said, gripping my knee, “and move upward from there. There is nothing wrong with starting as a scullery maid or housemaid. Besides, London is a magickal place.”

“What do you mean by magickal, mother?” I’d asked, my eyes wide as the city began to come into view. The day was clear and blue; already, I imagined the calluses on my hands growing smaller.

“I mean that you can be anything you want in London,” she replied. “Nothing great awaits you in the farm fields. The fences would have kept you in, as they do the pigs and as they’ve done to me. But in London? Well, in time, if you are clever about it, you can wield your own power like a magician. In a city so grand, even a poor girl can transform into whatever she desires to be.”

“Like an indigo butterfly,” I said, thinking of the glassy cocoons I’d seen in the moorland during summer. In a matter of days, the cocoons would turn black as soot, as if the animal inside had shriveled up to die. But then, the darkness would lift, revealing the butterfly’s striking blue wings within the papery encasement. Soon after, the wings would pierce the cocoon, and the butterfly would take flight.

“Yes, like a butterfly,” my mother agreed. “Even powerful men cannot explain what happens inside a cocoon. It is magick, surely, just like that which happens inside London.”

From that moment forward, I desired to know more of this thing called magick, and I could hardly wait to explore the city in which we’d just arrived.

At the servant’s registry office, my mother stood patiently aside while a pair of women looked me over; one of them was Mrs. Amwell, in a pink satin gown and a cap bordered with lace. I could hardly keep from staring: I had never in all my life seen a pink satin gown.