It is 1597 and Kit Skevy and Mariner Elgin have just robbed the wrong grave.
They are young criminals in the pocket of a gang Lord named Will Twentyman, the Grave Eorl of Southwark. Mariner is the best cutpurse around, a strange Calvinist girl who dresses like a boy and is partner in crime to Kit Skevy, Southwark’s best brawler who carries a secret: he cannot feel pain.
When caught out in their unfortunate larceny, Kit is kidnapped by the menacing alchemist Lord Isherwood (a man who will stop at nothing to achieve his hopes for the Red Lion elixir) and his studious son, Lazarus Isherwood, with whom Kit develops a complicated intrigue. When Mariner enlists the help of a competing French alchemist, Lady Elody Blackwater, Mariner and Kit are thrust into the shadowed, political world of Tudor alchemy, testing both their friendship and their lives.
It matters not who you are born to… but where you are made!
Emma Hinds has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews and has settled in Manchester, where she is a Queer playwright and Novelist. Her work focuses on telling untold feminist narratives. Her latest play, PURE, was featured in Turn On festival at Hope Mill Theatre Manchester in 2021 and she was the recipient of the Artist Development grant 2021 at Hope Mill Theatre. Emma’s debut novel, The Knowing (Bedford Square) was published January 2024 and is an exploration of female trauma in the vivid and cruel world of the Victorian freak show. This thrilling historical fiction title swiftly became a Sunday Times Historical Fiction Book of The Month. She has written a few previous non-fiction books in her capacity as an academic (in another life she was a theologian) with an essay published, Tarantino and Theology; with Gray Matter Books and her book, Ineffable Love: Christian Themes in Good Omens; published by Darton Longman Todd.
My thoughts: I really enjoyed this historical fiction adventure set in Elizabethan England (the first Queen Lizzy, not the more recent one!), mostly in the wild and infamous Liberty of Southwark, where theatres, inns, bear pits and brothels flourished away from the rules and influence of the City and the court.
Kit and Mariner work for the rather nasty Twentyman, a crime lord of sorts, and have been sent to dig up a corpse for a mysterious alchemist, then all Hell breaks loose in the graveyard and Kit is kidnapped.
Both young and more or less alone in the world, Kit and Mariner are not as they first appear, beneath their clothes are secrets, Mariner may look like a boy, dress like one too, but is in fact female, although she was raised as a boy by her uncle aboard ship. Kit is slightly more complicated and that’s the reason he’s been taken. Mariner determines to rescue him and the two are drawn into dark plots and schemes by a pair of dangerous nobles.
I loved Mariner, her boldness, her courage, her fierce love of Kit, even in the face of being forced to work in the brothel, although the woman who runs it for Twentyman doesn’t want her as one of her girls – too boyish.
Kit was fascinating as well, and somewhat more fantastical, as the story unfolds. Rescued from a past he can’t remember, raised by the gentle Griffin, who produces special effects for the theatres, and his sister Squire Kay, he might not be able to grow a beard yet, but he is impulsive, bold, clever and extraordinary.
Their adventures lead them close to death at times and into the finest houses and palaces in the land, not bad for two scruffy thieves from Southwark. They both get their hearts broken and fall apart, but finding their way back to each other, to the bond they share, offers hope of a better life, a life they dreamt of. Marvellous stuff.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 