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The Lavender Girl of Rotherhithe

Rotherhithe, 1877. Nell Sallis dresses the dead for a living — until she opens a coffin and finds a man who was buried alive. And somebody knew, and put the lid back.

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By Alice Blackwood — Victorian Romance

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The Lavender Girl of Rotherhithe

Nobody murdered him. He was buried alive. And somebody opened the coffin, looked at him, and put the lid back. Rotherhithe, 1877. Nell Sallis washes and dresses the dead for one and sixpence a body. She has done it since she was fourteen and she is better at it than anybody in the parish, which is how she comes to open a nine-week-old coffin in the January cold and find what nobody was ever meant to find. Fingernails torn off backwards. Splinters of elm driven up under them from beneath. Bruises of the kind that only form on a living body. And a man laid out straight and decent, with his hands crossed on his chest exactly the way she would have crossed them herself. Clement Chessum was certified dead by a physician of forty-one years' standing, coffined by a respectable firm and buried in front of a clergyman. He was also alive when the earth went over him. Somebody came back for him in the dark, and so the question is not who killed him. The question is who found him alive. And why they chose to put the lid back down. Nell has a shred of black glove leather, four iron screws where there should have been brass, and a button she should never have picked up. She has a father with eleven months in prison behind him and a name this parish has not forgotten. She has an apprentice doctor who believes her and can prove nothing at all. And she has until the last week of March, when the railway company clears the ground, the old coffin goes on a fire, and the only evidence in England burns with it. A Victorian mystery about the dignity of unseen work, the cost of being right, and what a woman with no standing can do when the truth belongs to her alone.

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The Sugar Girl of Bermondsey

Some truths the world would rather not hear. She was born knowing how to make them listen. Bermondsey, 1873. The air hangs thick with the reek of boiling sugar, and Martha Rye has given the refinery the whole of her young life. She cannot read a printed page. But she can read a column of figures faster than any clerk, a doubtful plank quicker than any foreman, and the truth of a person's face plainest of all. In a world built to talk over girls like her, that is a dangerous gift. When a wrong is done that the powerful would rather call misfortune, Martha is the only soul who refuses to sit down and let it lie. A sugar girl's word is worth nothing against a master's, and the few who might listen are the very men her mother warned her, with her last breath, never to trust. Least of all Stephen Harcourt. He is a gentleman, a doctor, everything she has been taught to fear. He is also the first man ever to look at Martha Rye and hear a person worth believing. What grows between them is quiet, and forbidden, and forged under threat. And it will ask of them both far more than either can afford to lose. A sweeping, atmospheric Victorian romance about grit, class, and the fierce hope of finally being heard. For readers who love a heroine who will not stay silent, and a love that has to be fought for every step of the way.

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The River Girl of Limehouse

The river takes what it wants. Eliza Barrett means to take something back. Eliza is thirteen, raised on a coal lighter on the Thames, with mud on her boots and her mother's good sense in her hands. The river is the only world she knows, and her family is all of it. Then, one ordinary evening, her mother steps off the lighter to settle a small matter of business, and never comes home. The river police ask their questions and leave unhurried. The wharf grieves and moves on. But Eliza knows her mother did not simply walk into the dark, and she will not let the water close over her as it closes over everything else. What she uncovers runs deeper than one missing woman: a quiet, respectable trade in secrets, and a man who has gone to a great deal of trouble to make certain people are never found. The search will take years. It will cost her more than she can count. And Thomas, the boy who has stood beside her since they were children, is becoming the one person she cannot bear to lose. A mother gone. A city that looks away. And a girl from the river who was never going to stop looking.

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The Silk Girl of Shoreditch

Shoreditch, 1880. Annie Tull winds silk in a failing loft, raised there from infancy by the old weaver who took her in and never once said from where. When he dies, he leaves her the one thing he had kept hidden under the floorboards all her life. It is a christening gown of fine lace, the kind made for the child of a great house, and stitched into the hem is a name that has never been her own. The name belongs to a family on the far side of the city, and to a daughter they buried twenty years ago. Some people have taken great care that the grave was never disturbed. They will take a good deal more to keep it so. Annie has been nobody her whole life. She does not mean to stay nobody now. A novel of silk and secrets, set in the working heart of Victorian London.

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The Wash-House Girl of Camden

A bloodied shirt. A secret worth killing for. And a washerwoman nobody thought worth fearing. Camden, 1865. Florence Webb has spent her whole life being looked through — a laundress who survives by noticing nothing and staying invisible. Then a gentleman's shirt comes down in the wash from one of London's great houses, stiff with another man's blood. She is meant to scrub it clean and forget. They chose her because she is poor, and frightened, and beneath their notice. They chose wrong. As Florence pulls at one loose thread, her livelihood crumbles and the law turns against her — and her only ally is the last man she should trust: a son of the very house she means to bring down. A slow-burn Victorian romance wrapped inside a mystery.

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The Lighterman's Wife

A prequel to The River Girl of Limehouse

A clever woman. A dangerous truth. And a river that hides what it chooses to keep.

Hannah Croft can add a column of figures faster than any man in the counting-house, and it has never earned her a farthing. In the cold, respectable heart of Victorian London, a woman with a head for the truth is worth nothing at all — until the winter everything she has is taken from her.

With her old life shut like a door behind her, Hannah goes east, down to the coal wharves and tar-black barges of Limehouse, to be no one. Among the lightermen and the tide she means to keep her head down, her figures true, and her past sewn well out of sight.

But the river has its own honesty, and its own hard bargains. There is a quiet lighterman who asks her nothing and sees her clearly. There is a shadow out of the life she fled that has not finished with her. And there is the one thing Hannah carries that she cannot bring herself to destroy — a truth that could cost her everything she has left, and the only thing worth the keeping.

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A standalone prequel — perfect for readers who love a capable heroine, a steadfast hero, and richly drawn working-class London.

About

Hi, I'm Alice.

I write Victorian romance novels from a small house in Yorkshire.

I'm drawn to stories about people who don't quite fit where life has put them — governesses, second sons, widows with opinions — and what happens when they decide to want something more.

When I'm not writing, I'm usually reading, walking the dog, or drinking too much tea.

— Alice

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