It's time for some historical fiction
White Chapel, London, England. Pretend it's 1888. Jack the Ripper is hunting, using White Chapel as a personal killing ground. The squalid, overcrowded inner city is home to a diverse, ever-changing population. Easy pickings for someone with evil on their mind.
After my trip to the UK last year, I decided to write some historical fiction.
This is my first attempt to capture it:
. . . Night's greedy arms had draped themselves across the road by the time Nettie pushed through the heavy door of the tannery. The darkness drenched the rough cobblestones and shrouded the faces of the passing strangers. She kept her eyes down, glancing up now and then to peer myopically ahead. The dragging toe of her left foot caught the edge of a broken stone and she stumbled, catching herself before she fell. A whimper of pain broke past her clenched teeth.
Her sudden stop drew the eye of a loafing drunkard. Smirking, he grabbed her arm with one hard, calloused hand.
"Best be careful there, lassie. You don't want to be ahurtin' yourself. You might muddy up that pretty little face," he said and brayed a laugh. "Maybe you might be looking for business? I can't pay in coin, but I would gladly share me Mother's Ruin with you," he added, leering.
Nettie flinched, yanked her arm free, and changing direction darted onto the street.
"I told you I'd pay in gin," he yelled after her.
Head down, eyes locked on the ground, Nettie pushed through the crowd. It was late. Too late for the likes of her to be out and alone. It was the time of night he roamed the streets—the White Chapel butcher, Jack the Ripper. It was only the week before that Mary Jane Kelly was found mutilated, her body left sprawled in an alley.
Nettie swallowed hard and moved faster. Misty rain coated her cheeks, soaking the patched shawl covering her shoulders. The raw damp air triggered the cough that had clung to her since Guy Fawkes Day a month ago. Four days before the unfortunate Mary met her end.
Another bout of coughing greeted the thought. She forced herself to breathe shallowly, trying to calm her lungs the way old Granny Jensen had taught her. The stench of mud and manure with its underlying reek of rotting fish filled her nose. She choked, coughing harder.
The thick fog rolling in from the Thames, gobbled up the broken buildings lining the road, shrinking her world to an arm's length in front of her nose. A week's worth of heavy rain had overwhelmed the bursting sewers and every step squished under the cracked soles of her boots.
"Keep moving," she muttered, tightening her grip on the two ha'pennies trapped in her palm. Their hard edges bit into her hand. Two ha'pennies. The price for scraping the putrid layer of entrails from the tanner's vats.
A hard bump from behind knocked her forward and almost off her feet. She swung and locked glares with a flinty-eyed street waif.
"Oh, sorry, your ladyship. I didn't see you thar," he said, ducking in an impudent bow.
He tossed her a cocky grin and melted into the crowd. Nettie took a deep breath. It was a good thing she carried the half-pennies in her hand and not my purse. Pick pockets didn't wear signs, at least not those who didn't get caught . . . .
Historical fiction?
I love it. It pulls me out of my world and dumps me into another time and place. I'm deep in a forest, watching a runaway hide from the king's soldiers, or on a train holding my breath as the gestapo demands papers from the man seated in front of me. Historical fiction writers not only create their story, but they craft it from our past and make us feel as if we are there.
Is it easy?
You might think so. After all, we have Google with its information overload, websites filled with maps, art, and history, and libraries stuffed with books written in the time the writer's chosen. Come on, it should be simple. But how do you get started? Cross your fingers, click your heels three times and dive down the rabbit hole, hoping to find yourself in the time frame you've chosen? There's a lot of information and history out there, complete with weird tidbits of knowledge guaranteed to distract you from your intended research path.
My distractions?
Discovering the Victorian sleep line where you paid two pennies for the luxury of a hangover, as in, literally hanging over a rope to sleep. Thriftier guests could spend a penny and sleep sitting upright on a bench all night.
Learning about the Jack the Ripper Tour after our trip.
Stumbling on blogs like Jack Chesher's Living London History blog and getting caught up reading through them.
Be warned, once you start looking, it's easy to be led astray!
What's my story?
The first novella, It's in the Bones, is set in today's London, in White Chapel, an area brimming with ghostly potential. As I said before, in 1888, this was Jack the Ripper's stomping grounds, but research opens all sorts of rabbit holes, and after writing what you saw above, my story took me back to 1850 instead. Poverty was rife, the sewers ripe and overflowing and the graveyards as crowded with the dead as the streets were with the living. It was London in the era of the resurrection men, the graverobbers, ghouls who made their living selling fresh corpses to the hospitals of the time. Medical science was evolving and cadavers were in demand. It was difficult to teach anatomy to the fresh young doctors-to-be without having something or someone to dissect.
The story line?
It is still developing. I can say that it's both a ghost story and a modern-day romance. In the words of Reg, (the supervisor on the building site where my protagonist apprentice architect, Kam works):
“London is old. Two thousand years of blood and sweat. You kick a rock and there might be a spirit attached to it. If . . . you believe in ghosts. Me? I like to keep far away from any of that."
He's right. London is old and riddled with ghost stories. All it took was a nighttime ghost tour, and my imagination was swirling. So here's a hot summer's day toast to It's in the Bones. I'll let you know when it's finished.
Cheers!
Carol
Can’t wait to read it all