The ghost is baring its teeth

Mors vincit omnia.

Death conquers all.

London 1883. The veil between the living and the dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums communicate with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather gouge out his violet eyes than become a Speaker's obedient wife. According to his mother, he will be married by the end of the year. It doesn't matter that it took him ten years and a series of tutors to manage to hide his autism, that he practises surgical procedures on slaughtered pigs from the abattoir, that he is a boy, even though the whole world insists on the contrary and sees him as a girl.

After his attempt to escape an arranged marriage fails, Silas is diagnosed with Veil Sickness—a mysterious illness that causes violet-eyed women to descend into madness—and is sent to Braxton's School and Sanatorium for Girls. The institution is cold, the carers merciless, and the students either blossom into desirable brides or disappear. So when the ghosts of the missing students begin to beg Silas for help, he decides to delve into Braxton's womb and expose its rotten insides to the world—unless the school breaks him first.