Immortal Rose

Set in the kingdom of Albion, a fantasy world resembling Regency-era England where fairy magic has been driven underground, the novel follows Viola Lockwood, a 25-year-old perfumer with a rare ability to detect people's emotions and life histories through their scent, or "essence." In Albion, fairyborn magic, meaning magic inherited through fairy ancestry, is forbidden for common people. Only the Patricians, the aristocratic class, may possess fairy relics, while anyone else caught using fairyborn magic faces imprisonment at Fairgate Prison. The House of Rosebourne Perfumery has long supplied the Patricians and the King with secret magic-infused perfumes.

The novel opens from Hugh Thornton's perspective. Hugh, the Earl of Foxcourt, has been pressuring master perfumer William Rosebourne to create a healing perfume, but Rosebourne refuses until Hugh locates his lost heir. Before Hugh can act, Rosebourne's coach explodes outside a gentlemen's club, killing the perfumer. Hugh survives and notes the scent of linseed oil on the fuse.

Viola sells magic perfumes at the illicit Midnight Market in a dangerous rookery. Each perfume exacts a personal cost: a beautifying perfume takes a measure of her beauty, a luck perfume takes her luck. When a military raid disrupts the market, a soldier with silver eyes and no detectable scent captures her. She spends two brutal days in Fairgate, beaten by a guard named Branson.

Oliver Radcliffe, Viola's only friend and the youngest son of an apothecary family, visits and proposes marriage to secure her release, but Viola refuses. The silver-eyed soldier returns dressed as a gentleman and reveals himself as Hugh. He offers Viola a bargain: create a perfume for the King, and she receives a full pardon. Viola signs.

Hugh takes Viola to Summerland Palace, where they secretly visit King Alfred III, who is gravely ill. Princess Eleanor, the King's niece and heir, explains that someone poisoned the King with a perfume disguised as a Rosebourne product, likely the work of the DeForest family, rival perfumers from the foreign kingdom of Gallia who also possess fairyborn magic. Eleanor presents the ancient golden flacon of Immortal Rose, a legendary healing perfume created by Viola's ancestor. The original has dried out. Viola agrees to re-create it but demands legitimization as Rosebourne's heir, with full control of the fortune and company, in addition to her pardon. The King consents. Viola recognizes a licorice-scented signature in the poison and estimates the King has roughly a week to live.

On the ride home, the curricle explodes just as Rosebourne's coach had. Hugh saves Viola by pushing her from the vehicle and shielding her with his body. He recognizes the linseed oil on the fuse and concludes that whoever poisoned the King will stop at nothing to prevent Immortal Rose from being completed.

At Foxcourt House, Viola meets Hugh's unusual household and his closest friend, Samir Reddy, a wealthy businessman raised alongside Hugh. She overhears a maid named Felicity confronting Hugh for having orchestrated Viola's arrest and imprisonment as a means of recruiting her, deepening Viola's distrust.

Disguised as solicitors, Hugh and Viola infiltrate Briarwood Palace, the Rosebourne estate, to retrieve the Treasury, an ancient book of perfume formulations in fairy ink that only Rosebourne descendants can read. The Treasury reveals that Immortal Rose requires the divine nectar of the Afallach tree, a mythical fairy plant. Without it, the only alternative is sacrificing a life of equal worth to the one being saved.

Hugh confides his suspicions about his half-brother, the Duke of Glenmoor, whom he believes poisoned their mother, their great-uncle, and the King. Glenmoor has been named regent in the event of the King's death and seeks to control Eleanor through marriage. Hugh later reveals the trauma driving his obsession: After his father died, Glenmoor threatened Hugh's mother for her dowry, forcing her to flee with young Hugh. Glenmoor tracked them and sent a poisoned perfume that caused her such agony she took her own life while Hugh watched helplessly through a window, locked outside.

A newspaper accuses Viola of poisoning the King, using evidence from her stolen mother's journal, and Glenmoor seizes formal power as regent. He visits Foxcourt House and strikes Viola with his walking stick when she refuses to work for him. Hugh obtains a special marriage license, explaining that marriage to a peer would protect Viola from arrest. After agonizing deliberation, Viola agrees on strict terms: The marriage will be annulled after Immortal Rose is completed, and it will never be consummated. Hugh signs the agreement in his own blood, making it a sacred, binding oath.

During the hasty wedding, Viola begins experiencing excruciating pain: The dress she wears has been laced with poison by Glenmoor's agents. Hugh tears the dress from her and submerges them both in the garden pond. During her recovery, Viola catches Hugh's true essence for the first time when he removes the fairy charm that masks his scent, and their bond deepens.

Viola discovers that her biological father is Robert Greystone, a notorious crime lord known as the Butcher of Linden. Rosebourne's commonplace book reveals the perfumer traded rare fairy oils, including the Afallach nectar, to Greystone in exchange for help finding Viola. Viola and Hugh infiltrate Greystone's gambling hell during a masquerade, where incense laced with fairy magic overwhelms them both before Hugh's charm breaks its hold. Viola negotiates with her father, offering to help with the damaged magic afflicting him in exchange for the nectar, which he promises to deliver by the following midnight.

News breaks that Glenmoor has secured the King's consent to marry Eleanor. At the Midsummer Ball, the household executes an elaborate plan: Willie Longmount, one of Hugh's operatives, pickpockets Glenmoor's fairy charm, which has been blocking the Crown of Veracity, a truth-compelling perfume Eleanor has worn all evening. Eleanor publicly confronts Glenmoor, and the duke is compelled to confess his conspiracies before high society. He flees. Hugh pursues him but is ambushed and poisoned by an accomplice. Though Hugh wounds Glenmoor, the duke escapes.

Greystone delivers the nectar, but it is a single drop, enough for only one dose. Viola faces an impossible choice: save Hugh, or save the King and claim her inheritance. Vernon, the King's valet, confesses that the previous Lord Foxcourt kidnapped children from the rookery to steal their youth for the King's Blend perfume. Vernon himself was one of those children. The King knowingly benefited for decades, and this secret is what Glenmoor has wielded as blackmail.

Viola chooses Hugh. She channels the nectar's magic and applies the completed Immortal Rose to his skin. She then blends a second batch without the nectar, identical in scent but devoid of healing power, and takes it to the palace, intending to let the King die.

At the palace, Oliver appears and accompanies Viola to the sickroom. When the physician applies the perfume, it burns through the King's flesh, killing him. Oliver switches the flacons, replacing Viola's inert perfume with an acid-laced one. He reveals himself as the true poisoner and a secret DeForest descendant who possesses the same fairyborn abilities as Viola. Glenmoor recruited Oliver, and together they planned to seize the House of Rosebourne and create perfumes powered by human sacrifice. Driven by bitter resentment that Viola never returned his romantic feelings, Oliver uses a magic perfume to compel her obedience, but she breaks free by headbutting him. Oliver escapes while palace guards capture her, believing she murdered the King.

Viola awakens in her old cell at Fairgate, alone and facing execution for regicide. An explosion rocks the prison, followed by gunfire. A hooded figure appears at her cell with a lantern, and the novel, apparently the first installment of a series, ends on a cliffhanger as Viola demands to know who has come for her.