The Taxidermist's Mute Apprentice
A Victorian Romance

About this book:

In the soot-choked heart of 1842 London, seventeen-year-old Clara has known only the cruel silence of St. Jude's orphanage—her voice stolen by fever, her future sold for five sovereigns to a man who preserves the dead for a living. Arthur Crannock is a taxidermist of unsettling precision, his hands stained with arsenic and his shop on Fleet Street a cathedral of glass eyes, wire armatures, and secrets that arrive in wicker hampers after midnight. He expects a pair of steady hands to dust feathers and scrub tables; he does not expect the girl who meets his clinical gaze with a slate and a star-shaped mark, unafraid of the heron's opened breast or the kittens sleeping forever beneath glass domes.

What begins as a transaction of labor for lodging becomes something far more dangerous: a shared language of touch and silence in a workshop where the boundary between preservation and possession grows thin. As Clara learns the terrible beauty of Crannock's craft—how to coax life from death with a brush of poison and a needle's kiss—she discovers her master guards wounds no arsenic can cure. But in a city where curiosity dealers traffic in more than specimens, and the past has a way of clawing out of its casing, the mute apprentice and her taciturn master must decide what they're willing to sacrifice to keep each other from becoming just another exhibit in the dark.

Lush with gothic atmosphere and charged with the electric tension of two isolated souls recognizing their match, *The Taxidermist's Mute Apprentice* is a Victorian romance that breathes through the spaces between words—where love is measured in the steadiness of a hand on a razor's edge, and the most fragile specimens are the human heart.