"They called it the Bridge of Sighs because it barely passed a night without a suicide, That night was no different. In the very centre of Waterloo Bridge, nine grim arches of new cut granite arching over the freezing Thames, a figure climbed up onto the parapet......her red gold hair streamed behind her like a pennant. She lifted her arms at her sides like Christ on the cross.....a passer by might have thought her and angel. But she was no angel. She was a prostitute. Her name was Annie Stride"
Now you have to admit that is a pretty gripping opening paragraph. I read it and was hooked. I have read a couple of other books by Marina Fiorato and knew that this was likely to be a goodie and my plans, such as they were, vanished for the rest of the day as I sat and read Crimson and Bone straight through.
As a teenager I loved historical novels. I used to stun my history teacher at school with some fragment of information, some erudite bit of knowledge about a Tudor minister of state, or a Spanish princess, and took her congratulations with a smug grin, mentally thanking Jean Plaidy whose entire oeuvre I demolished over the years. I found her narrative style somewhat lacking even then, but boy did she do her research and her historical facts were never wrong. She also wrote novels under the name Victoria Holt which were usually set in Cornwall in a derelict castle or old house with creaking floor boards which I loved at the time but, sadly, now find have lost their charm. No matter. I enjoyed them when I read them.
Margaret Campbell Barnes, Pamela la Belle, Margaret Irwin are just a few more authors I read in the sixties and seventies and, thanks to the wonderful Endeavour Press, who have republished them as e-books, they are now available again and, unlike the above mentioned Jean Plaidy, they are still immensely readable.
So back to Crimson and Bone. Annie is stopped from flinging herself off a bridge by Frances Maybrick Gill, a talented pre-Raphaelite painter, who takes her home and looks after her. Like Annie, we assume the obvious reason for this, but we would all be wrong. He wants to use her as a model, as his muse for a series of paintings. She is fed, clothed, washed, perfumed looked after, she is given educational books to read, taught to speak properly, all very Pygmalion and when the paintings are shown at the Royal Academy she becomes the toast of London.
Throughout all of this Frances makes no attempt to seduce her or to make her his mistress, theirs is a platonic relationship, but and I am pretty sure I am not giving anything away here, it is clear that all is not right. The reader will hone in on this from the beginning, but as the months go by and Frances takes Annie to live in Florence and continues to paint her and give her everything she needs, she begins to feel a sense of uneasiness, a feeling of being trapped and she and we begin to sense that something is about to happen.
And it does.
I was constantly wondering where I had heard the name Maybrick during my reading of this story, it rang a vague bell with me. It irritated me so much that in the end I checked it out and, guess what? Some people think he may have been Jack the Ripper....
I will say no more.
A terrific read. Go get.
