A lie can travel halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on. Or, in this case, a contemporary artwork shared by a witty but mistaken tweeter can lead to a myth taking root worldwide, with over 16,000 retweets and nearly 30,000 Twitter likes in a few days. That’s a lot of people who now think this is true and that Charlotte Bronte really did go for muddy walks in her black silk mourning slippers and then fix them with Emily’s hair, not forgetting to embroider little sprigs of heather on the insoles.

Last week, @BookwitchSara tweeted,

No matter how goth you think you are, you aren’t Charlotte “I repaired my mourning shoes with the hair of my dead siblings” Bronte

together with a photo of what purported to be Charlotte Bronte’s black silk mourning shoes in a glass cabinet at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth.

The label in front of the shoes was clearly visible:

6.Mourning shoes

1850

Leather, silk, human hair

SP6

Long walks over damp ground caused damage to Charlotte’s mourning shoes which she meticulously repaired with the hair of her departed siblings. A sprig of heather, symbolizing solitude, is believed to have been stitched with Emily’s hair.

Charlotte GREAT & SMALL

Not surprisingly, the tweet went viral and was picked up by both The Poke and Metro, the latter being very taken with the actuality of the whole thing:

she literally repaired her shoes with the actual honest to God hair of her dead siblings.

But she didn’t.

The shoes are part of an artwork by the artist Serena Partridge, who

makes accessories and garments inspired by European costume, dating back some six hundred years. In her work, scale and proportion are distorted to create curios that often send up the futility of life à la mode. Serena renders her follies more mysterious by presenting them as museum acquisitions, encased with fictional labels.

Serena has confirmed on Twitter: she made the shoes, the story is fictional (though Charlotte going for long solitary walks is not) and the hair belongs to a member of the Bronte Parsonage Museum staff and (in a lovely literary twist) the novelist Tracy Chevalier. ‘Charlotte Great and Small’ on the label refers to the name of the installation.

The use of hair in Victorian mourning jewellery is well-known, as is hair embroidery, though I don’t know of it being done on shoes, and it seems unlikely, not least because you wouldn’t want your precious relic of your sister to get foot-sweat and grime on it. I also don’t think you would have worn your expensive black silk mourning shoes for walks–the Victorians had practical outdoor boots just like we do. This is fine, though, it’s part of the fairytale Serena Partridge was spinning, and once you understand the point of her work the incongruities make sense.

So if you have seen and shared the tweet, please share the correction: tell your friends Charlotte did NOT embroider those mourning shoes. She wasn’t a Goth, she was a real Victorian person following the mourning rituals of her age and we owe it to the people who lived in the past to respect the truth about them.

Note:

I’m not interested in blaming any of the original three parties involved in this, the artist, the tweeter or the museum. The artwork is exquisite and I feel privileged to have seen it when I visited Haworth. The information about who really made the shoes is there in the museum; it’s quite hard to see, but then, it’s an endlessly tricky call in historic house museums how much text to put in and where to put it. Too much, obtrusively placed, and the atmosphere will be ruined and it will be harder for visitors to see the actual house and objects, but too little, displayed unobtrusively, and you risk people missing important information, as happened here. I do think Metro is culpable, though, because it claims to be a news site and I remember a time when reporting news meant more than just screengrabbing from Twitter without even bothering to go back to the original tweeter’s timeline to see if she had pinned a correction–which she has.

 

 

 

FIve Wounds is now officially out, and can be winging its way to your Kindle in seconds for a bargain price of either £2.99 from Amazon.co.uk or $4.61 at Amazon.com.

Hope you enjoy it – if you do, please leave a review at either Amazon or Goodreads, and tell your friends!

Here’s the Amazon.co.uk link…

And here’s the Amazon.com link!

Visit Goodreads to see what reviewers have said, or read the extract below.

And a big thank you to everyone who has helped get the book this far.

 

***************STOP PRESS***************

 

Thanks to all the preorders, Five Wounds is now #1 on Amazon.co.uk in Young Adult historical hot new releases and #1 Bestseller in Young Adult historical – Renaissance, as well as reaching an amazing #5 in Young Adult historical bestsellers!

 

 

 

PART ONE

Oh kindly Jesu for the wound of your left foot keep me from the sin of envy…

(From Dame Agnes’ Book of Hours)

1

My sister’s sweetheart gave me the hawk. I was six months home from the convent, and struggling to live under my father’s rule.

‘Look,’ Henry said. ‘For you. May said you wanted one.’

He lifted the lid off the basket and two huge eyes peered up at me, shiny as beads of jet.

‘It’s a merlin. To hunt with. Larks and things. You can train her yourself.’

I cupped my hands round the ball of grey fluff and lifted it out. Its heart throbbed against my fingers, too huge for its tiny body. My own heart turned over unexpectedly. I love you, I thought.

Henry said, ‘I’ve brought you all the things you’ll need.’ He reached under his fur-trimmed gown and brought out a pouch. ‘There’s a hood, a glove and some jesses to tie her up by. When she starts to fly, give her a reward every time she comes back to your hand. She needs to think you’re her only way of getting food. Take care when you start to fly her free. If she finds out she can hunt for herself she’ll be gone.’

I brought the merlin close to my face and stared into its fierce eyes. It opened its beak and squeaked angrily at me. ‘Ki-ki-ki-ki-ki!’

Henry beamed. ‘Do you like her? She’ll need a name,’ he said. ‘What are you going to call her?’

May rolled her eyes. ‘She’ll probably call her Alcelda after the Saint.’

She was baiting me, but I called the hawk Alcelda anyway. The nuns had venerated St Alcelda. She was my friend and protector and I loved her like a mother. The baby bird had been torn from her nest as I had from the safety of the nunnery, but I would be her mother now, and teach her to hunt.

The first time she landed back on my outstretched hand of her own free will, my spirit rose. Now her hunting could begin.

By September, Alcelda was fully fledged. Her fluffy grey doublet and hose had given way to sleek feathers, like a brown velvet gown with a speckled forepart. I loved to walk about with her on my hand, her jess strings wrapped firmly round my fingers. When I took her hood off her head would bob up and down as she looked from left to right, beginning to sight prey.

Last week she had nearly made her first kill in the watermeadows near my father’s manor house. She had chased a kingfisher back and forth along the stream while May and I shrieked in excitement. My bird made contact, but the kingfisher found an extra burst of speed from somewhere and got away. ‘She tapped it on the arse!’ May was practically jumping up and down. ‘Did you see? She’s touched her prey. She’ll kill in no time now.’

Today my hawk and I climbed the hill alone. Skylarks twittered above our heads. Today, I was sure, she would taste her first kill. No bird in the world could fly like my pretty falcon.

I pulled her hood off, stretched out my arm with her at the end of it and let go. She took off and rose above the treetops, the leather jess strings trailing behind her. I held my breath with excitement. And then she wheeled round and landed in a tree.

‘Oh, you–’ I stood under the tree and spoke to her sternly. She began to preen.

I tried wheedling. ‘I can hear skylarks.’ She looked at me blandly. ‘You can too! You’re just pretending not to listen.’

Alcelda put her head to one side, shook her tail feathers at me, took off again and soared.

I watched her go, and in my mind I soared with her. We gazed down together at the sheep grazing on the hillside, the farmland hacked from the forest, the heather-thatched houses clustered around our little stone church.

‘Nan! Nan!’

My sister was scrambling up to me, holding up her skirts so her scarlet petticoat glowed like a jewel against the tufty grass. ‘Father wants you. You need to come now.’

‘I can’t!’ I called.

‘You must.’ May stood panting next to me. ‘He’ll be angry if you don’t come at once. Come on.’ She tugged my sleeve.

‘If I’m not there for her to fly back to, she might not come,’ I said desperately. ‘I could lose her.’

My sister laid her hand on my shoulder. ‘Give me the glove. She’ll come to me.’

I pulled off the gauntlet and handed it to her, but I did not take my eyes off the merlin.

‘Go on.’ She gave me a push, and I stumbled down the hill, watching the hawk rather than my footsteps until she was out of sight. As I crossed the bridge over the moat I turned and squinted up into the watery sunshine. She had sighted prey!

The skylark flew round in circles, and she flew after it. Faster and faster. She was gaining on the little lark! Then, with a sudden change of direction, the lark slipped out from under her.

I walked backwards towards the house, still watching as Alcelda recovered the chase.

A third dark dot was moving towards them. I clapped my hand to my mouth. A bigger bird, a kestrel, come to harass my little falcon and steal her prey.

The kestrel was heading for them, straight as an arrow. It swerved. It was not after the lark. It was after Alcelda.

A quavering voice sounded from inside the house. ‘Nan? Are you there?’ My grandmother. The kestrel dived. Alcelda spun out from under it but the kestrel took aim again, flying faster than she could. I bit my lip. There was nothing I could do. With a last, hopeless glance at the sky, I straightened my cap, smoothed my skirts and plunged into the darkened house.

The particular smell of my father’s study made my chest tighten. Candle grease, spilled wine gone sour, the leather of his sword belt. He sat behind his table. In his gown with padded shoulders he was a square dark shape against the window, blocking out the light.

‘Father.’ I kneeled for his blessing.

From my place on the floor I could see a patch of sky above the hillside, but the duelling birds were out of sight.

‘Get up, daughter.’

I scrambled to my feet, still breathless from my run down the hillside, and waited for what was to come. A scolding? A beating? My heart thumped.

My father leaned back in his chair and looked me up and down, a smirk of satisfaction at the corners of his mouth.

‘Well, girl. How would you like to marry Lord Middleham?’

Lord Middleham? I must have misheard. The most powerful man in the next dale. A baron. Wealthy. But how old? My mouth opened and shut, and no sound came out.

‘Are you stupid? Yes, Middleham, you know who I mean.’ He was beaming, triumphant.

I clutched the edge of the table, dizzy with shock. ‘Sir, I had hoped to go back to the nunnery when the trouble is over. I’ll be sixteen in a year. My aunt said I could take my vows then.’

He snorted. ‘You’ll never make a nun. Too disobedient.’

‘But–’

‘This will be good for the whole family. You’d be a noblewoman. No one in our family has ever risen so high.’

‘How old is he?’ I asked. I could hardly get the words out.

‘Old enough. He doesn’t need an heir, he’s already got children, older than you. Married three times. That’s a good thing, to my mind.’ My father stroked his beard. ‘An older husband is good for a rebellious girl. Rules her better.’

My head whirled.

‘Here, read this.’ He unfolded a letter and held it out. ‘I’ve been hunting about for a match for you for a while. Never thought I’d find one as good as this. Want to know how I did it?’ Without waiting for an answer, he went on, ‘He wanted to buy the parcel of land we’ve got in the other dale. You can see it from my lord’s own window. So I told him I wouldn’t let it go, except as the marriage portion of one of my daughters. Never thought he’d bite. But he said he was looking for a new wife and he’d heard my girls were young and pretty.’

My grandmother would never allow me to be married against my will! ‘Is the contract signed?’

‘As long as the country stays quiet we’ll ride over to Beldon Castle next week. It’s the best part of a day’s travel. If he likes you we’ll sign the betrothal papers then.’

‘What if he doesn’t like me?’

‘Then he can have May.’

‘She’s already betrothed to Henry Hutton,’ I objected.

‘Contracts can be unmade, if both parties agree.’ He took the letter back and folded it.

Not May and Henry! She lived for him. It would break her heart.

‘It’s a love match,’ I said. ‘You can’t unmake it.’

‘Don’t say can’t to me. By God, girl, remember who you’re talking to.’

I shut my eyes. I needed to be a nun.

I had to be with the Sisters, to serve God. To pray, help the poor, maybe even–I swallowed–rule a convent as Abbess myself one day. Then, because I had spent my life being holy, I would rise to Heaven, with the Saints and my mother. How could I give all that up to spend my life bearing children and answering to a man who might be even harsher than my father?

But May. My only sister, sweet as honey and sharp as vinegar. My ally and friend against my father.

I clenched my fists, and remembered May a long time ago, running towards me, screaming, blood splashed on cobbles like scraps of red silk. She had saved my life. After what she had done for me that day, how could I let my father send her to Lord Middleham in my place?

I knelt down again and took my father’s hand. ‘Please don’t make May break off her betrothal. I’ll marry Lord Middleham if I must–’

‘If you must!’ He shook my hand off his. ‘I make you the best match in the whole of Yorkshire and you talk as if I’m selling you to the Turk. God’s blood, you have a nerve.’ He picked up a silver wine goblet and took a swig. ‘Upon my honour as a knight, any other girl would be kissing my hand in gratitude.’ He banged the goblet down and wine slopped onto the table.

‘It was a surprise. I am grateful.’

‘Aye, so you should be.’ He tucked the letter in his sleeve. ‘It’s more than you deserve. May wouldn’t be fighting me. She’s a proper daughter.’

I flinched. It was true May wouldn’t fight him. She was older than me but more cowed. The betrothal to Master Hutton had only come about because Henry was rich and charming and had set himself to persuade my father with presents and flattery.

‘May’s prettier, too,’ my father muttered. ‘Men always like her sort of looks better. The yellow hair. You’re darker and not so womanly. Perhaps I should let him have May. Less likely to cause trouble.’ There was a warning in his voice.

‘No, please, sir.’ I tried to sound eager. ‘I am ready to marry Lord Middleham. I’ll do my best to make him want me.’

My father’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’d better please him, wench. This is the best chance we’ve had in all my life. We’ll be connected through this match with all the powerful families in the north. With you as Lady Middleham, every door in Yorkshire will be open to us.’ He eyed me coldly. ‘You’ve let me down before. If you fail at this I’ll put you out of doors without a penny.’

‘Grandmother!’

She was sitting by the fire in the parlour, sewing my father’s shirts. Surely she would talk to him? Surely she would be on my side?

My grandmother laid down her sewing. ‘He’s told you, then?’

‘You know?’

‘Know? I suggested it.’

My hope of help drained away. ‘You?’ I said weakly.

She gave a cunning smile. ‘I knew that land would come in useful. It was the first piece I bought for myself. His Lordship cares more for his estates than he does for money or preferment. He could have made a better match than our family without lifting a finger. Half the widows in the North Riding set their caps at him when his last wife died. But my bit of sheep run sticks into his estates like a finger up his arse. He’s wanted to get his hands on it for years.’ She yawned. ‘I little thought when I was working at the tannery that I’d one day be grandmother to Lady Middleham. How the wheel of fortune turns.’

‘But– ‘ I began.

‘But what? Your heart’s not elsewhere, is it?’

‘No, I swear. How could it be?’

‘Then what? I thought you’d put aside that silly idea about being a nun.’ She smoothed the linen out with her gnarled hands. ‘I don’t think he’s a bad man. I’ve never heard ill of him.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘The Duke of Norfolk has taken a mistress and locked his wife up. He’s given all her clothes to his lady and when his wife complains, he beats her.’

‘I wasn’t aware the Duke of Norfolk had asked for my hand,’ I said.

My grandmother poked me. ‘You’re a saucy baggage, Nan. Granddaughter, I’m seventy-one years old. God could take me at any time. I want to go to my rest knowing you’re safely wed. If there’s trouble afoot there are worse places to be than behind the walls of a castle. Besides, it will raise you in your father’s eyes. Don’t you want that?’

I couldn’t answer. A little voice like a demon on my shoulder whispered in my ear that I did. It would mend the harm I had done to my family. It would make things right with my father again.

I picked up some heads of dried camomile that lay on the table next to her sewing basket and began to crumble them in my fingers. They smelled like the nunnery garden in sun.

She swiped at my hand. ‘Stop fiddling, Nan. They’re to keep the linen sweet when it’s packed away. I don’t want them broken.’

‘Father said if Lord Middleham doesn’t want me he can have May.’

‘Did he?’ A flicker of concern appeared in her eyes. ‘I don’t expect he meant it. You do your best to please him, and all will be well.’

The sun was setting when I came back up the hill to find May. I sighed with relief. The hawk was back on her wrist and she was feeding her with pieces of chopped coney.

‘Guess what? She fought the kestrel off! She turned on it and chased it away. And then she got a lark! I’ve kept it for you, here it is, look–’ She saw my face. ‘Nan, what is it?’

I took the bird’s jesses and let her hop straight onto my hand. Without the glove her talons dug into me. When I told May what my father had said her mouth fell open in horror. ‘You can’t do it. I’d die if I had to marry someone I didn’t love.’

I avoided her eyes and busied myself with picking out a morsel of liver for the hawk. I had reported my father’s command to me but not what would happen if I failed to obey it.

May said, ‘I’d probably hang myself with my girdle if it was me.’

‘Then you’d go straight to Hell. It would be a mortal sin.’

‘I know, but–oh, Nan. You don’t know what love means until you find it, and then…’ She smiled vaguely up towards the trees, her lips parted and her eyes faraway, as if she were having a holy vision. ‘I know that every moment I’m going to be with Henry, I’ll be happy. I can’t imagine not having that. Of course, you don’t know about love. You don’t understand, living in the nunnery you never had a chance–’

‘Now I never will.’ A chill came over me.

The bird snatched the meat from me, her sharp beak nipping my fingertips, and golloped it down.

I had never thought about earthly love before, locked away from men in the convent. The only love I knew about was the ecstatic devotion to Jesus of some of the nuns. When they talked of it their faces had worn the same blissful expression as May’s.

Standing here on the hillside, I understood what I had never realised in the convent. Why some women became nuns and others wouldn’t in a thousand years. Love for men or God was the same. It drove everything, and I would never have it.

I turned away and stiffened my shoulders. I might not know love but May had. I couldn’t ruin it for her.

‘Nan.’ She pulled me back to face her and put her arm round me. Her eyes were wide with sympathy. ‘You don’t have to do it. You could come and live in Kingston-on-Hull with me and Henry, after we’re married. Henry wouldn’t mind.’

‘I can’t break the betrothal once it’s made,’ I said. ‘It’s a solemn contract. And Lord Middleham is too powerful. He has armed men. They’d come after me with horses and swords.’

‘Oh, Jesu,’ May said. She looked across to the church spire that pointed up from behind the trees, as if we could hope for divine help. ‘You need a miracle.’ Her lips twitched. ‘Maybe you could grow a beard like St Uncumber did when she didn’t want to marry the pagan prince.’

I grimaced. ‘Or put my eyes out like St Lucy and hand them to him on a plate.’

There was a painting of St Lucy in the village church. She held the plate with her eyeballs in front of her. Her lips were fixed in a beatific smile, even though she had empty sockets where her eyes should have been and her cheeks ran with blood. Two more virgin martyrs stood beside her: St Catherine, painted above the spiked wheel that broke when they tried to crush her on it, and St Agnes, wreathed in the hair that grew miraculously when they sent her naked to a brothel. They were serene and happy, haloed in gold leaf.

They had resisted what their fathers had planned for them, and were sainted for it.

But I was ordinary and sinful.

And if I disobeyed my father it was May, not me, who would pay the price.

Buy Five Wounds on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

Read reviews of Five Wounds on Goodreads

Very excited to see the cover for Five Wounds (published 1st March). Big thank you to my super-talented cover designer, Peter O’Connor of http://bespokebookcovers.com/ – I would definitely want to read it now, if I hadn’t written it!

I had a massive Norah Lofts binge over Christmas. Lofts is a deeply unfashionable writer who people in the know keep saying should be rediscovered. Alison Weir has been plugging away at it, and, brilliantly, was instrumental in getting some Lofts books back into print, while the availability of ebooks and the possibility of finding out-of-print books on ABE or Amazon means that there’s never been a better time to discover her.

Lofts was born in Norfolk, in 1904. She came from a farming family, something which had a lasting influence on her writing, as you will see, but worked as a history teacher before she turned to writing full time. Over a long and busy career she wrote more than 60 books, mostly historical, but with a good handful of excellent psychological thrillers too (the Hammer horror film The Witches was based on one). The Oxford Book of Historical Stories calls her ‘one of the undisputed queens of historical romance.’

I first came across Norah Lofts at thirteen, when I was making my first forays into historical re-enactment and was advised by the organiser to read Lofts for her incomparable grasp of historical detail, and because many of her books are set in Suffolk, where the Tudor house we were re-creating, was. Her ability to handle historical detail, work it effortlessly into a story and endow it with great emotional charge, is certainly second to none. I came to Lofts for the research. But I stayed for the storytelling. How’s this for an opening?

‘At the age of seven I was a skillful pickpocket. I could also sew neatly, write a tolerable hand, make a curtsey and a correct introduction, dance a little and play simple tunes on the harpsichord.’

It’s the start of ‘Felicity Hatton’s Tale,’ the first story in the third book of her fabulous Old Vine trilogy. Lofts had a particular liking for taking a house and tracing its residents through history. Other people have done this with towns (notably Edward Rutherfurd, in Sarum, London and others) but no-one has done it as convincingly as Lofts.

The house at Old Vine is built by Martin Reed, a runaway serf at the turn of the fifteenth century, who takes his own destiny into his hands after his lord refuses him permission to marry the girl he loves. The rest of the first book, The Town House, takes place over Martin’s lifetime. But the fabulous thing Lofts does is to shift viewpoint with each chapter, to the old woman who comes to look after him, then his daughter-in-law, Anne, daughter of an impoverished knightly family who marries beneath her, then his grand-daughter Maud, then his secretary. They’re all such different people, in motivation, life-experience and style of thinking, and the fresh perspectives allow us to see the characters we have come to know intimately, as other people see them. Thus we see them change and grow old – young, hopeful, Martin keeping stoically on, Anne who we first knew as a teenager becoming bitter, alcoholic and cruel.

The second book in the trilogy takes us through the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and the third book from Georgian times to the modern day, when the house is no longer lived in by Martin’s descendants. Throughout the series there are incredible stories, and, I should add, incredible TEENAGE stories. Ethelreda Benedict, forced out of the island home she shared with her father when it was flooded by the draining of the Fens. Felicity Hatton, who has to survive in Georgian London after her father’s gambling addiction has beggared her family. And (perhaps my favourite), the dreadful Anne, who calculates that marrying the woolmaster’s son and living in a town house with glass windows might be a come-down for her family but it will lead to a far more comfortable life for herself than staying in her parents’ isolated hall forever unable to afford the dowry for a respectable match.

Like Alison Weir, I rate the House trilogy the most highly, but the prolific Lofts produced many more books worth reading. Broadly speaking, her historical fiction falls into two categories – historical biography, and Suffolk books. The historical biography is not confined to England – there is a splendid book, Crown of Aloes, about Isabella of Spain – and includes one of the most sensitive fictions written about Anne Boleyn, The Concubine.

The Suffolk books, which include the House trilogy, all take place in or around a fictional town called Baildon, which is similar to (though not identical with) Bury St Edmunds. One of the joys of being a hardcore Norah Lofts fan is the way places and families recur across the books, so the fictional world becomes deeper and richer than anything that could be achieved in one book alone. We know which family has a streak of gambling addiction, which breeds the best horses, which local in is best and who built the Assembly rooms. One particular strength of Lofts as a writer, in a genre which can often focus on the rarefied and privileged lives of the wealthy, is that she is as interested in the lives of the ordinary people as those of kings or queens. Even her Anne Boleyn book is told from the viewpoint of a serving maid. Lofts’ farming background comes into this in a big way, writing as she is about a rural country through centuries when most people were closely tied to the land. Martin Reed first meets Anne Blanchfleur when he is visiting his sheep, and her mother lets him heat his tar pot on their fire. Lofts understand the economics of farming: what it means to have a farm of a certain size, or to carry out the work yourself (as another knight’s child, Henry Tallboys, does in the Knight’s Acre trilogy).

There is another sense, too, in which Norah Lofts’ books are realistic, and it is one of the things I like most about her work. Despite her designation as ‘historical romance’, which would conjure up images of happy endings, for Lofts the world is a brutal, unfair place. Good deeds go unrewarded, and, often to a very disturbing extent, bad ones unpunished. Murders are regularly concealed, and criminals live on benefiting from their crimes. This lack of idealising makes her world feel very real. When I used to borrow Norah Lofts books from my local library, their spines would be stickered, seemingly at random, with either a black castle to designate ‘historical fiction’ or a pink heart with a crown on top for historical romance. I wonder how many readers picked them up expecting to be transported to a delicious tale of swooning damsels, only to find they had been sucked into a gritty story of murder and medieval farming practices. Sometimes there is supernatural, and there is often evil – the Gad’s Hall books involve Victorian girls and devil worship – but the down-to-earth nature of her style adds to the plausibility and creepiness, as, for example, in the one I have just finished, The Devil’s Own (also called The Witches, Catch As Catch Can and The Little Wax Doll), published under the name of Peter Curtis, in which the prim heroine is horrified by the sight of the unattractive bodies of her middle-aged neighbours as they dance naked at the Halloween meeting of their coven.

So, where to start with Norah Lofts? To begin with, she did write two books specifically for teenagers, both based on characters from the Old Vine trilogy, Rupert Hatton’s Tale and Maude Reed’s Tale. I would recommend these to younger readers, but really these date to a time before Young Adult fiction had reached the no holds barred place it is in today. Older teens will be perfectly comfortable reading her adult books (and their parents/teachers should be happy with most of them too – if delicate you might want to give the Peter Curtis ones a miss, and The Claw should probably have an advisory sticker but mostly there’s nothing more shocking than you will find in Jacqueline Wilson). The Old Vine books are a good place to start, as is Bless This House, which uses the same ‘house through history’ technique but in a single volume. The first Knight’s Acre book is eventful, and interest in the characters will probably carry you through the second two, even if they are a bit heavy on the farming. Of the biographical books, I have already mentioned The Concubine, and The King’s Pleasure is a sympathetic portrait of Katherine of Aragon, and Crown of Aloes a fascinating book about Isabella of Spain. For those who like their history earlier, The Lute Player is about Richard the Lionheart, or, earlier still, Esther fictionalises an Old Testament book. Lofts is equally comfortable in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and The Lost Queen is a moving book about George III’s younger sister. Goodreads has plentiful reviews, and there is a thriving group there for the hardest of hardcore fans – a group which, I suspect, is destined to grow and grow as a new generation of readers discover the Queen Of Historical Romance. Or rather, Of Gritty, Dark, Agricultural Histfic With Lots And Lots Of Murders….

This is the story I’m going to use to frighten small children at my kids’ Halloween party tomorrow. Every word of it is, of course, true. That’s what they think, anyway.

The Bell

This is actually a true story. It happened in this house. I didn’t want to tell you before in case you were scared. Is everyone ok with hearing the story? You can go and play in the dining room if you like. The lights are on in there.

You all want to hear it?

All right then.

This is something that happened in Victorian times, about a hundred and fifty years ago. At that time the house belonged to one very rich old lady who lived here all by herself. Her name was Mrs Taylor.

Now, when I say by herself, she actually had servants. There was a gardener called Mr Bean who lived down the street and just came in the morning, but there was also a cook-housekeeper called Mrs Brain who slept in the attic and most of the time, another servant girl who would be the maid-of-all-work.

Being a maid-of-all-work was a hard job. And the shocking thing is, the girls who did it sometimes weren’t even grown-ups or even teenagers, they were children like you. They had to be the first person to get up in the morning, to do the fires, carry up Mrs Taylor’s bathwater and even empty her smelly old chamber pot from under the bed. Then during the day they were at everybody’s beck and call, doing the hard jobs, the scrubbing and scraping and blackleading and fetching and carrying. At night they would collapse into bed exhausted but they still had to listen out for the bell, in case Mrs Taylor wanted anything in the night. There was a bellpull right by her bed and if she woke in the night she would ring it as hard as it could so that it jangled in the attic bedrooms and woke up the poor maid to come down and see what she wanted.

To make matters worse, Mrs Taylor was mean. She paid her servants as little as she could get away with and she fed them on her leftovers: stale bread, scrapings from her plate. Even then they didn’t get enough. And she beat her little servant girls with her walking stick if they made a mistake or didn’t come fast enough when she rang.

Not surprisingly, nobody ever stayed in the job for any longer than they could help, so she was always having to write to the Malton workhouse master or the orphanages in York to see if they knew of anyone who was desperate enough to take the position.

One day, Mrs Taylor was sitting by her cosy fire, reading the latest installment of a magazine story about a missionary being eaten by cannibals, when the doorbell rang.

The cook-housekeeper, Mrs Brain, put down her rolling pin with a sigh and went to answer the door. Of course Mrs Taylor didn’t actually get up and answer her own door – that was what servants were for.

In the doorway stood the master of the workhouse, and next to him, a tiny scrap of a girl, no bigger than Lily here.

The workhouse master tipped his hat. ‘Brought your new servant girl, ma’am. The lady of the house wrote me a letter.’

Mrs Brain screwed up her eyes. The girl didn’t look like she’d be much use. Her arms and legs were skinny as twigs and her cheeks were hollowed out, as if she never had enough to eat. She didn’t just look weak, she looked ill. Her eyes were red with dark circles under them, and she kept her hand pressed in front of her mouth, as if she was always trying to stop herself coughing.

Mrs Brain showed her into the drawing room and Mrs Taylor looked the girl up and down. ‘She doesn’t look much, but she’ll have to do,’ she said. ‘She can start right away. Tell her to go and fetch some water to scrub the floor in the hall, and when she’s done that, the water closet wants scouring.’

She didn’t even ask the little girl’s name.

The girl’s name was Hannah, and she had lived in the workhouse nearly all her life. She was actually suffering from an illness called tuberculosis, which was why she coughed so much. Anyone who cared enough to notice could have seen she was ill, but the workhouse master didn’t care, Mrs Taylor didn’t care as long as the fires were lit and the chamber pots emptied, and even Mrs Brain, who might have been kind to her, only grumbled about how feeble and slow she was, and how she couldn’t carry a heavy bucket of water without stumbling and spilling half. If she had been properly fed, and rested, and kept warm, she might have recovered, but there was no hope of that in this house.

Poor Hannah had a terrible time of it. It wasn’t enough that she was kept on her feet all day long. Mrs Taylor was a bad sleeper, and woke several times in the night, and each time, she would ring her bell and Hannah was expected to come running. Sometimes it was to fetch a book, or a biscuit, sometimes Mrs Taylor complained she was cold and wanted the fire lighting. Each time, Hannah had to struggle out of bed in her thin nightgown in the freezing cold attic room. It was not surprising that her cough got worse, and she grew thinner and thinner.

I am very sad to have to tell you that Hannah died. One night when Mrs Taylor rang the bell and Hannah stumbled out of bed as usual, she found that she could hardly stand up. At the top of the stairs she wobbled, and tried to reach for the rail to stop herself falling, but instead she tumbled right down the stairs and broke her neck. She was only ten years old. The vicar suggested Mrs Taylor might like to give some money to pay for a proper burial for her, but she was too mean, and Hannah’s tiny remains were buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave without even a coffin to protect her from the earth and the worms.

A week or so later, Mrs Brain had to go to visit her sister in Pickering, who was sick. Mrs Taylor grumbled, but she let her go, because she knew that if she didn’t, Mrs Brain might leave, and she might never find another cook-housekeeper to look after such a big house for so little money. So Mrs Brain arranged for Mr Bean the gardener’s wife to come in just before bedtime to help Mrs Taylor to bed, and once again early in the mornings to light the fires. This meant that Mrs Taylor was completely alone in the house.

It was a wild, windy night, so windy that the streetlights blew out and the street was in pitch darkness. The wind rattled the windowframes and blew down the chimneys, making a noise like somebody moaning, ‘Oh, oh.’ Alone in her comfortable bed, Mrs Taylor shuddered. She pulled the thick bedcovers up around her head and tried to block out the noises, until at last she fell asleep.

In the middle of the night, there was a loud bang on the window. She sat bolt upright in bed, her heart racing. But the tapping continued, until Mrs Taylor realised with relief that it was just a branch of one of the holly trees blowing against the window. She slid back under the covers and went back to sleep.

There was another bang, a lighter one this time. Mrs Taylor half woke up, and groped for the bell. As it clanged in the distant empty attic she remembered she was alone, and there was no-one in the house to answer. ‘Fiddlesticks!’ she said. ‘If that silly girl hadn’t gone and fallen downstairs…’ Light, pattery footsteps sounded on the uncarpeted attic stairs.

Mrs Taylor gasped.

‘Rats,’ she whispered to herself. ‘It must be rats or mice.’ But the footsteps were on the landing now, and were coming closer and closer.

They stopped. Mrs Taylor held her breath. And then there was a cough, just outside the room.

Mrs Taylor froze. She had to send the maid away! Summoning up all her courage, she managed to squeeze some words out. ‘I – I don’t need you after all,’ she called shakily.

The door of her bedroom slowly opened. Mrs Taylor squeezed her eyes tight shut.

‘It’s quite all right,’ she said faintly. ‘You can go back to bed now.’

The footsteps came closer and closer, until at last they stopped right beside her bed.

Mrs Taylor forced herself to open her eyes.

It was Hannah all right, standing only inches away from her, and looking even thinner and sicker than she had done in life. Her skin was a deathly white, and there were still bluish bruises on her bony arms, where Mrs Taylor had hit her with her walking stick just two weeks earlier. Her hair hung down by her cheeks, clods of earth clinging to it. Something writhed in her ear. Mrs Taylor let out a cry of horror when she saw that it was a worm.

The apparition made a little, tired curtsey. ‘I came at once, Ma’am,’ she said. ‘I was in my grave but I came at once.’

Mrs Taylor screamed. ‘I don’t need you,’ she gabbled. ‘Go back to bed – I mean back to your grave – you’re ill – I’ll pay for the doctor – oh, I’m too late, aren’t I? I’m too late! Please, go!’

The ghost gave a slight, feeble smile. But she did not move.

When Mrs Bean came the next morning to help Mrs Taylor dress, she found her curled up into a ball on the floor in the corner of the room, gabbling incoherently about maids-of-all-work, graveyard mud and bells. She went straight back home to fetch her husband, who took one look at her and went straight for the doctor. The doctor decided she must have had a nervous breakdown, and she was sent to a hospital for a very long time.

When she came out of hospital, Mrs Taylor did try to make amends. The house had been shut up while she was gone, and Mrs Brain had found another job in Pickering, near her sister, but she engaged new staff, a cook and two maids, who she paid almost twice as much as she had given the wretched Hannah. She also gave a considerable amount of money to the workhouse master, to buy better food for the paupers. Unfortunately he stole it, and something terrible happened to him as a result, but that is a story for next Halloween.

You’ve probably noticed the bell next to the fireplace. That’s one of the bells Mrs Taylor used to ring to call Hannah. Does anyone want to ring it? No?

I’m writing this post because I’ve recently heard some more people bemoaning the fact that they can’t afford to take a creative writing course. I’m all for creative writing courses – never done one myself, but I know a lot of people who have, and who had a brilliant time as well as learning lots. But the idea that people feel held back by the fact that they can’t afford one makes me sad. Honestly, you do not need formal teaching. It is great, but not critical.
So here are my tips about how to put yourself through your own DIY creative writing course. It’s basically what I did, and you have to be very focused and determined to make yourself do it, rather than relying on a course for structure and impetus. But then, you need to be focused and determined if you want to be a writer anyway, so we’ll take that as read. 😉

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three main things that people get out of a creative writing course (apart from the kick up the arse to actually write, which we’ve already agreed you don’t need):

1. The generic teaching of the craft – classes, lectures etc.
2. Skilled critiquing of your own writing
3. The supportive peer group

The thing is, all these things can be accessed for free, no matter where you are in the world, as long as you have access to the internet and a library which can order in books it doesn’t already stock.

We’ll take them in reverse order.

3. The supportive peer group
If you have a local writers’ group, great. (I would love one, not least so we could go to the pub afterwards.) Otherwise, join an online writing forum. AbsoluteWrite.com is one. Scribophile is another. And CritiqueCircle. There are loads, and you can join several.
Once you’ve joined, start developing friendships with other writers that you hit it off with. Offer to critique other people’s work – this is vital. It will help you learn to write, it will leave you with a pool of people who will be eager to help you by critiquing your work when the time comes, and it will make the advice they give you easier to take on board.

2. Skilled critiquing of your own writing
This is where the friendships with other writers come in. Some websites also have a section where you can post things for anyone to comment.
Of course, I’ve had some wonderful, helpful insights from people I’ve been fortunate enough to know who happen to be talented writers. However, I have found that some of my best critiquers aren’t fiction writers themselves – my readers have been a mixture of writers and keen readers. As a historical novelist I’ve been lucky to have a few historian friends who read my stuff. But I’ve also had excellent advice from friends who simply love reading and are capable of expressing opinions about what they’ve read.

1. The generic teaching of craft
There is plenty of stuff online – helpful blogposts, discussions in forums about particular aspects of craft. However, for depth and detail, I have found books essential. The writers’ forums are fantastic for helping you work out which books, though. (I’ll write another post listing a few of my favourites.)

So, how do all these elements work together?
Well, the first thing you do is begin writing. Start to write your first draft (with or without planning, depending on how you work best).
As you start to write, you will start to understand where the gaps in your knowledge lie. You realise you don’t have a clue how to put together a plot – or, you have a good idea of the plot but can’t work out how to write dialogue.
It may not be a good idea to go rushing to the creative writing books at this stage, though. What I would recommend is to keep going until the end of the first draft, writing and writing without stopping to think. For actually getting through that first draft, you will find your supportive peer group essential. Cheerlead each other, post daily wordcounts, tell your friends when you’re flagging and the chances are you’ll get a friendly nudge back on track.
Once you’ve got to the end of the first draft, you put it in a drawer – don’t show it to anyone yet – and that’s when the creative writing books come out. Take a while to work through a couple. Now you’ve had the experience of writing a whole draft they will make a lot more sense to you than they would have done a few months earlier. You’ll start to get some sense of how much you know and how much you don’t know.
After a month or so, when you’ve more or less forgotten about the story that was consuming you a few weeks earlier, get the draft out and read it again. This part hurts – you will cringe at bits, either because they’re just plain badly written, or because your newfound knowledge from the creative writing books makes you see more clearly what doesn’t work. You go to your supportive peer group, cry a bit online, then buckle down and do drastic rewriting. Then you put it away for another month and do some more reading of creative writing books, maybe critique some stuff for a friend, chat about writing online. Oh, and read more fiction. Obviously. You never stop doing that.
When you come back to reading draft 2, you might feel ready to show it to a friend, or it might be too early for that – if you can see for yourself what needs fixing, better to fix it yourself before asking anyone else to expend effort on it. It might be draft 2 or 3 or 4 that gets read. Once you have comments to work with, you might find yourself going back to the creative writing books again, this time re-reading relevant bits that relate to the comments you’ve had on your draft: how to tighten your saggy middle section, or make your lacklustre love interest more compelling.
There’s no limit on the number of drafts you will need. Keep going as long as you can feel it getting better with each draft.
Of course, you don’t end up with an MA this way. If you’re very lucky, and talented, you might end up with a publishable book. Most importantly, though, through the repeated feedback process of writing-reading-writing-reading, your writing will have come a very long way.

Click here for my post on my favourite creative writing books