History

(Content warning: References to neglect, substance use, infidelity, and spousal abuse.)

un.

M'hemm l-ebda warda mingħajr xewk.
There is no rose without thorns.

Maltese proverb.

What makes Mrs. Alice Johnson-Riley the most curious is that she doesn't exist. 
  
Amira Hanım Andrews Al-Rashid was born in the early dawn hours one spring morning in 1851, to Captain Sebastian Andrews, an English soldier in the British Royal Army, and his bride, Leila Amira Hanım Al-Rashid, a woman of Ottoman (Turkish), Greek, and Bavarian descent whom he had met while stationed near Constantinople. The Captain had been given leave to elope to Paris and tend to his new family in this time, but loss would follow the young lovers, taking Leila only a few short days after the birth of their first and only child.

Broken and bereaved, the Captain took orders to relocate to Malta, where he hired Rosa, the first of many surrogates that would serve as Amira's motherly figures over the years. A sharp-tongued local woman, Rosa's colorful personality would invite a precocious awakening in Amira's predilection toward strong-mindedness and curiosity, grounded as much as driven by the Maltese woman's fondness for culture and language. 
  
Rosa would remain with them until 1855, when Amira's father abruptly decided it was time his daughter was given a chance at a real upbringing. He had been spending more time away from the home than in it, and so, at age four, Amira was taken to live with the Delevingne family in Paris. 
  
The Delevingnes were a modest bourgeois family that her father knew from the months spent there with Leila and one of the few families he felt he could trust to bring Amira up in a way that kept her safe and out of the way. Well, out of his way, anyway. 
  
Claude Delevingne was a lawyer, while his wife, Madeleine, was a sociable member of Parisian society. They were an altogether respectable family who sought to provide Amira and their own children with stability, structure, and a good education. She was given lessons and guidance that enabled her to explore a talent in tongues, an aptitude for the piano, and a vivid imagination to fill the pages of any journal. 
  
Unfortunately, any stability and structure she might find for herself here was often challenged as the Good Captain would drop in unannounced, telling the children fantastical tales of his adventures in the Mediterranean and bringing with him books and souvenirs. And he would promise his Little Princess that one day, he would come and take her home with him, and they would be a family again. 
  
And then the Good Captain would disappear again for months at a time, leaving Amira to grow despondent and, eventually, rebellious, running away, stealing things, and instigating arguments or physical altercations with her peers. Her relationship with the family would spoil and sour over the years by this cycle, and by the time she was seven, the Delevingnes had grown exhausted by her increasingly escalating antics. 
  
Captain Andrews had as of yet no intention of taking the girl under his direct care again, and in 1859, Amira was taken to stay with another trusted family in Paris — Jean-Pierre Lefevre and his wife, Anne. A merchant, he and his wife had no children of their own and were able to provide a more rigid and dedicated upbringing for Amira. At least, that was their intention, but the Good Captain would continue to entertain his daughter's enthusiastic imagination, enabling the continuation of their cyclical behavior with him showing up and filling her head with ideas and then withdrawing entirely for weeks and months at a time. 
  
The Lefevre family would not last as long as their predecessors, and by the time Amira turned 10, there weren't enough books to keep her occupied. Much as the Delevingne family had done, they beseeched Amira's father to reconsider their arrangement. 

deux.

Les chiens ne font pas des chats.
Dogs don't make cats.

French proverb.
  
It was, at last, time for the Good Captain to be a Father. In 1861, he took Amira with him to London for the first time, where they would live in a small townhouse. Nevertheless, the King's needs kept him from settling into his daughter's life for too long, and soon, Amira was once again being raised more by strangers than her father.  

The sporadic attention continued, even when they technically occupied the same roof; Sebastian's moods could be unpredictable, oscillating between devout and attentive father and distant and abrasive guardian. As he neared the end of his military career, he was spending more and more time in the Mediterranean, adding further strain to an already tumultuous relationship with Amira, who was in turn developing as a headstrong and opinionated monster.  
  
Her father finally retired in 1864 after twenty years with the British Royal Army. Within a year of being home in London with his daughter, they were keen to stab each other in their sleep. The following year, another retired soldier showed up, and her father locked them away in his study all through the night amidst shouts and excited yelling. The next morning, her father told Amira that she was being sent away again.  

École de Mademoiselle Cuvier in Paris turned out to be a moderate bore for Amira; she found most of her peers to be intellectually unstimulating and lacking in scintillating conversation. All the same, being enrolled in the girls' school meant she was back on the Continent, and to his credit, her father's visits were much more frequent. Additionally, he began to take her on trips with him when there was time for it: Rome, the Iberian Peninsula, Alexandria, and Cairo. These travels opened Amira up to a world she'd only read about or dreamt of after hearing her father's stories her whole life.
  
He encouraged her curiosity and intellectual pursuits and exposed her to languages and cultures, but even then, there was a guardedness about her father that she could not quite pinpoint. Some might have said it was the ghosts of war still haunting him. Amira, however, could provide no explanation, attributing it to a vast lack of understanding of who her father really was, no matter how they managed to span the divide between them. 
  
As Amira blossomed into a young adult, she endeavored more and more to discover these other parts of her father, to unravel the mysteries that he harbored around him like armor. Once she completed formal education, she had a venomous fight with her father about her future, and he played his part predictably until the two returned to non-speaking terms.

trois.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Scottish proverb
  
Following that rift, Amira moved to Paris in 1871 and reconnected with the Delevingne family, whose own daughter was now married and with a young boy of her own. In need of a governess, the Delevingnes were delighted to employ the young girl who had grown into the semblance of a mature and sensible young woman. 
  
Amira would remain with the Delevingne family through the addition of a young daughter to her tutelage and instruction, and she seemed to be settling into a respectable lifestyle for herself. 
  
By 1873, however, Amira had already grown restless, itching in her soles to explore the world and carve out a path for herself that was not just lessons and choreographed social engagements on the children's behalf. She wanted to do more than just read about adventures; she wanted to live them. At twenty-two and unmarried, however, there were not a great deal of prospects for such a thing, and she resigned herself to an unhappy life of quiet contentment. 
  
Such words did not easily fit into her vocabulary, and she spoke several languages. When her father sought to rendezvous with her in 1875, she could not deny her curiosity, and with the Delevingne family's blessing, she took the next train to the next chapter of her life.

quatre.

facilis dēscensus Avernō
The descent into Hell is easy.

Latin proverb

Chasing her father to Rome would prove to be one of the greatest mistakes of Amira's life, and she has made many. Sebastian Andrews had become a dangerously connected man with too many debts and a desire to get into trouble at any opportunity. She knew him as a well-informed expert on antiques and artifacts, but greed and a misplaced sense of entitlement had also turned her father from an honorable soldier into a maleficent smuggler, artfully hidden behind the mask of good intentions. 
  
And those connections he had made along the highway to hell? Among them, the alluringly brilliant and charismatic Henry St. Clair. Amira's education and intellectual skills made her a formidable asset to their team, and Henry wasted little time in trying to convince Sebastian that they needed his daughter — and the next several years convincing Amira that she needed him, leading to their marriage in Paris, 1878. Another mistake for Amira's Greatest Hits. 

It was not that her husband was a difficult man to love; on the contrary, it was too easy for Amira to love him, as though he and he alone could fill the special niche hole in her soul. She was readily convinced of this, swept up by romanticized notions of her father's relationship with her mother and the way Henry always seemed to know exactly what to say in order to unravel her very being. But for as much as Amira gave and gave of herself, their relationship was troubled by Henry's capacity for letting good money slip through his fingers at the table, as well as his penchant for putting his fingers where they didn't belong.

cinq.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

Macbeth
Act II, Scene I

Her father could do no right, and her husband could do no wrong, and somehow, somewhere along the way, she found herself utterly entangled with the pair of them in a spiral she could not be free of, not when they regularly kept her from knowing all the details of their business.

They traveled together. They fought with each other. They shared victories over champagne and opium. Money came, just as quickly as money went. What meager excuse for a business they tried to run, they did themselves more harm than good by waiting so long to give Amira more insight into their operation. Finally, it was Amira whose talent for letters and numbers gave them the insights they needed to make a change in their enterprise.

The world was evolving. The Empire was changing. And London was waiting.

Henry and Sebastian set up a meeting with a new buyer in Whitechapel after months of Amira organizing the connections. Although it was decided that Amira's presence wasn't necessary for the actual meeting, she would join them back in England, intending to have tea with an old school friend while the men dealt with the business matters.

When she returned to their hotel rooms that evening, Amira's life would be forever changed.

six.

Sabır acıdır, meyvesi tatlıdır.
Patience is bitter, its fruit sweet.

Turkish proverb

It had been over a year with no leads, no one who cared to pursue the murder of people no one cared about anymore. And then some months ago, Amira received a small parcel where she had been staying in Marseille, addressed to her by an alias she assumed as a variation of her English name: Amelia Andrews. There was no indication of who had sent the parcel, although there were only a few who might have used that name to find her, and its contents brought only more questions than answers. 
  
Contained within were all the documents and currency someone would need to travel from Marseille to London in the most obscure and roundabout way. She found an itinerary that took her first to Genoa, then Lisbon, before taking the transatlantic to New York. From there, a train to Boston, then a ship back to Liverpool, and then another train to London. Next, she found notes on where to find safe lodging; to her continued bewilderment, she did not recognize the handwriting.
  
Finally, on a carefully marked slip of paper, the following phrase was written in that same unfamiliar penmanship: Henri Lefevre est vivant. 

Henri Lefevre is alive.
  
Amira had crumpled that day, for the second time in her life. There was no way he had to be alive. She had held his lifeless body in her hands after finding them both murdered in their hotel room.
  
And yet, someone believed him to be alive and using that name — and that someone seemed to be summoning her to London with every possible detour along the way.  
  
It was the perfect mystery to pull her out of her grief, but at what cost? Three decades of questions forged a path to a place full of fake smiles and generational resentment. Caution would be her mistress in this hellscape of iron and wine.

Under the careful guise of Mrs. Alice Johnson-Riley, Amira St. Clair arrived in London in the middle of November, 1887, with one goal in mind: find out what really happened to her family.