Fox The Fascination

The INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ... This year's most bewitching, beguiling Victorian gothic novel
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-914585-54-8
Verlag: Orenda Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

The estranged grandson of a wealthy collector of human curiosities becomes fascinated with teenaged twin sisters, leading them into a web of dark obsessions. A dazzlingly dark gothic novel from the bestselling author of The Somnambulist. `Makes skilful use of the tropes of Victorian gothic fiction... a story of society's outsiders seeking acceptance and redemption´ Sunday Times `An inventive slice of gothic fiction, big-hearted and full of strangeness´ The Times `A dazzling kaleidoscope of darkness and light´ Laura Purcell `A magical, macabre masterpiece´ A.J. West `Brimming with Victorian wonders!´ Sean Lusk ________________________________ Victorian England. A world of rural fairgrounds and glamorous London theatres. A world of dark secrets and deadly obsessions... Twin sisters Keziah and Tilly Lovell are identical in every way, except that Tilly hasn't grown a single inch since she was five. Coerced into promoting their father's quack elixir as they tour the country fairgrounds, at the age of fifteen the girls are sold to a mysterious Italian known as 'Captain'. Theo is an orphan, raised by his grandfather, Lord Seabrook, a man who has a dark interest in anatomical freaks and other curiosities ... particularly the human kind. Resenting his grandson for his mother's death in childbirth, when Seabrook remarries and a new heir is produced, Theo is forced to leave home without a penny to his name. Theo finds employment in Dr Summerwell's Museum of Anatomy in London, and here he meets Captain and his theatrical 'family' of performers, freaks and outcasts. But it is Theo's fascination with Tilly and Keziah that will lead all of them into a web of deceits, exposing the darkest secrets and threatening everything they know... Exploring universal themes of love and loss, the power of redemption and what it means to be unique, The Fascination is an evocative, glittering and bewitching gothic novel that brings alive Victorian London - and darkness and deception that lies beneath... ________________________________ `Fascinating and immersive´ Anna Mazzola `It had me spellbound´ Louisa Treger `A wonderful, captivating carnival of a novel´ Elizabeth Fremantle `Essie Fox's best novel to date - weaves terrors with triumphs, heartache with hope´ Culturefly `A scintillating cabinet of curiosities´ Foreword Reviews `A cast of characters Dickens would be proud of´ Frances Quinn `Rich, dark and heady ... a glorious gothic carnival´ Kate Griffin `Magnificent ... a triumph´ Dinah Jefferies `A tender, beautifully written meditation on what it meant in Victorian times to be an outsider´ Historical Novel Society `Darkly gothic, but surprisingly tender ... rendered with such magical and often terrifying authenticity. A marvel´ Damian Dibben `Filled with gothic darkness and glorious hope´ Liz Fenwick `Full of horrors and delights´ Bridget Walsh 'An opium trance of a novel, a vivid fantasmagoria´ Noel O'Reilly `Deliciously dark, full of twists and surprises´ Liz Hyder `What a triumph!´ Emma Curtis `Very fine historical fiction´ Emma Carroll `Truly unexpected and original´ Kate Forsyth `A dizzying potion of a novel´ Polly Crosby `A sumptuous, gothic treat´ Caroline Green `Exceptional storytelling´ Nydia Hetherington `I loved this group of wonderful 'others'´ Marika Cobbold `An exquisite novel´ Erika Mailman `Haunting and emotive´ Gill Paul

Essie Fox was born and raised in rural Herefordshire, which inspires much of her writing. After studying English Literature at Sheffield University, she moved to London where she worked for the Telegraph Sunday Magazine, then the book publishers George Allen & Unwin - before becoming self-employed in the world of art and design. Always an avid reader, Essie now spends her time writing historical gothic novels. Her debut, The Somnambulist, was shortlisted for the National Book Awards, and featured on Channel 4's TV Book Club. The Last Days of Leda Grey, set in the early years of silent film, was selected as The Times Historical Book of the Month. Her latest novel, The Fascination is based in Victorian country fairgrounds, the glamour of the London theatres, and an Oxford Street museum full of morbid curiosities. Essie is also the creator of the popular blog: The Virtual Victorian. She has lectured on this era at the V&A, and the National Gallery in London.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fox, Essie

Leseproben

ONE

An Introduction to

THE MONSTERS

Grandfather snatches at his arm and drags him through the study door. The boy has never been inside, because the room is always locked, though he has often stood on tiptoe with one eye pressed to the keyhole – only to see a soup of shadows. But there are smells, and smells seep out. The ones that puddle round this door are wood and leather and vanilla from the pipe Grandfather smokes. Is that what stains his teeth so brown, even the tips of his moustache and the tufts of bristled white that are sprouting from his ears?

His grandfather looks like an owl, and his nest is very dark, although some buttered rods of light are creeping in around the shutters closed across the big bay windows. They form a ladder on the floor leading towards the painted globe set on a stand beside the hearth. How the boy would like to spin it, to look at all the greens and blues, the lands and oceans of the world. But to do so he would need to navigate the tiger skin lying on the boards before it. The tiger’s head is still attached. The tiger’s eyes reflect the flames blazing red in the grate. They seem alive, and dangerous.

Less threatening are the deer heads mounted high upon the walls. Their softer, melancholy gaze falls across the rows of tables laid with trays containing beetles, butterflies – or are they moths? – of almost every size and colour he could possibly imagine. Inside glass domes are birds and fish, and other animals the like of which he’s never seen before. At least not when he’s been exploring in the gardens or the fields that spread for miles around the house.

These specimens – the old man calls them, letting go of the boy’s arm as he gruffly points them out – are macabre, but beautiful. Some are embossed with silver pins that fix them down on squares of velvet. Some hang on wires, invisible between the palest pinks of corals, pearly shells, or stems of leaves, all being artfully arranged to form the backdrops of displays that represent the distant places where these creatures had once lived. Lived, before they died.

Did his grandfather go travelling to find and then to kill them, to bring them back to Dorney Hall? Sadly, it is too easy to imagine such a thing. And while continuing to stare the child is all but overwhelmed by a sense of loss and sorrow. This, he often thinks when he is older, looking back, is the moment when he first becomes aware that in some vague and unknown future everything that ever lived is doomed to die; although the notion slips away with a blast of onion breath, when his grandfather demands, ‘What sort of age are you these days? I’ll be damned if I can tell. Such a stumpy little imp. But I believe you must have had another birthday recently.’

‘Yes, my birthday was last week, and now I’m seven years of age,’ the boy replies, feeling confused, because birthdays are not events Grandfather likes to celebrate. But Cook, and all the maids, and his governess, Miss Miller, they gathered round the kitchen table. They had him standing on a chair while everyone sang Happy Birthday … Happy Birthday, dearest Theo! How they’d cheered and clapped and laughed, and said that he must make a wish as he was blowing out the candles on his favourite kind of cake. The sort with strawberries and cream.

‘Seven? Is that so?’ Grandfather sounds surprised. His heavy brow is concertinaed into furrows of concern. There is a pause. A mucus crackle in his throat, and then a cough, ‘Well, that’s a rather special number. I must set affairs in motion. You should be off to school by now or you’ll end up a pampered fool, being fussed and molly-coddled by the women in this house.’

Why is the number seven special? Theo thinks about the stories from the Bible he has heard on Sunday mornings when Miss Miller takes him to the village church, and being eager to impress this man he barely ever sees – to prove that he is not a fool – his voice is piping in excitement: ‘God made the world in seven days. Adam and Eve. The sun and stars. When it rained, there was an ark. A great big ship made out of wood. A man called Noah built it, and then he filled it up with every kind of animal on earth. They came in marching, two by two.’

‘The past crushed up as sugared pills and swallowed down by simpletons!’ Another weary sigh precedes the damning interruption. ‘You must think deeper. Dig for truths. What if there were other species? What if the beasts we now imagine as being nothing more than myth may once have actually existed? May still exist today, in far-off corners of the world.’

‘Do you mean the dragons? The …’ What is the word? The boy forgets and, glancing back towards the globe, he recollects a recent lesson when Miss Miller told a story all about some giant bones being discovered by a girl not much older than himself. She’d been walking on some cliffs in quite another part of England. The place, it had a funny name. Something like limes? Or … was it lemons?

‘Dinosaurs,’ Grandfather says. ‘There are displays in London. The British Museum. Perhaps one day you’ll get to see them. But, for now, I’d say it’s time for you to view my own collection.’

‘Your collection?’ Dinosaurs? This is a thrill beyond all measure. How can it be? Where could they be? But then this house is very big. So many places you could hide things. In the cellars, or the stables, or the barns, or mausoleum underneath the private chapel.

‘No,’ Grandfather snaps, before his lips curl in a smile through which his yellowed teeth protrude, ‘But, as it happens, I do have some unusual exhibits.’

Another door is opened. A door you’d never guess was there, made to look like shelves of books. A fusty smell is seeping out. And something sharp and sour too. Is it vinegar, or bleach? The things Cook uses when she’s on a cleaning spree down in the kitchens?

His grandfather is swallowed in a curdling of gloom, although his voice remains quite clear. ‘I’ll light the gas. There are no windows. The darkness helps to stabilise the preservation fluids, whereas the objects that are stuffed…’ There is a grunt of disapproval. ‘Must get my butler to come in and lay more poison down. The wretched vermin in this house!’

Grandfather’s mutterings have stopped, and now the boy can hear the rasping of a lucifer on tinder. There is a swimming green and gold, and the hissing sound of gas as flames illuminate the darkness. It is the eeriest illusion, almost like being underwater. Suddenly, he cannot breathe and even fears he might be drowning. Can he turn and run away, back through the hall, and up the stairs?

But the doorway to the hall is entirely lost from view when, for the second time that day, Grandfather reaches for his arm and almost lifts him off his feet, ‘For pity’s sake! Stop whimpering. There’s nothing here to be afraid of. At least’ – a phlegmy chuckle precedes the cryptic inference – ‘not in their present forms.’

Like Alice falling through the glass, the boy’s whole world turns upside down. Now he is on the other side of what appears to be a cupboard, little bigger than the store in which Cook keeps her jams and pickles. His head is spinning. He feels sick as he inhales metallic fumes. His eyes are drawn towards the dirty-looking leather of a glove left on a stand beside the entrance. But, oh, the horror of the thing when Grandfather picks it up and says it’s not a glove at all, but a hand that has been severed from a man accused of murder, who met his death upon the gallows, over three hundred years ago.

‘It’s called a Hand of Glory.’ Grandfather holds the ghastly thing underneath a burning jet, and now the boy can clearly see the stringy tendons that protrude through the mummified grey flesh, the horny ridging of the nails. ‘People had them dipped in wax, threaded the fingers through with wicks … lit them up like candelabras!’

The hand is thrust towards him. The boy cries out and stumbles back against the wall with a thud. His shoulder is hurting, but there’s no sympathy to follow. Only the bark, ‘Where is your backbone? Lily-livered little urchin! My wife was just the same. Not that long before she died, she found me here … and what a scene. Ran through the house screaming blue murder.’

The boy would like to scream. The sweat is breaking on his brow. The flutter of his heart could almost be a frightened bird; wings beating hard against the trap of the ribs that curve around it. His breaths are coming much too loud, almost like thunder in his ears when, behind a wall of glass he sees a head without a body. The marbled blue of shocked round eyes could be his own reflected back. But from this other child’s brow protrudes a gnarled and curving horn, like the tusk of the rhinoceros he’d looked at yesterday in Miss Miller’s illustrated Animals of Africa.

He turns away with a shudder, only to see a larger head. This face is covered in dark hair. The sawdust spilling through one nostril looks like a lump of crusted snot. Two dark-brown eyes...