The Word Cloud

A SECRET ALCHEMY

Emma Darwin

From the reviews:
"Powerful and utterly convincing." - Daily Mail

"There is historical fiction - and there is historical fiction. Anyone can dust down a set of fusty old names, chuck in a few mead-fuelled brawls and the odd syphilitic courtesan and be done with it. It takes real skill - and devotion - to bring characters blurred by the passage of time into focus, to breathe real life into them, to make their existence tangible to the 21st-century mind. In A Secret Alchemy, Emma Darwin has managed such sorcery... Spellbinding." - The Times

Publishers' Description:
Two murdered princes; a powerful queen betrayed; a nobleman riding towards his certain death... The story of the Princes in the Tower has been one of the most fascinating - and most brutal - murder mysteries in history for more than five hundred years. In a brilliant feat of historical daring, Emma Darwin has recreated the terrible, exhilarating world of the two youngest victims of the War of the Roses: the power struggles and passion that lay behind their birth, the danger into which they fell, the profoundly moving days before their imprisonment, and the ultimate betrayal of their innocence.

In A Secret Alchemy, three voices speak: that of Elizabeth Woodville, the beautiful widow of King Edward IV; of her brother Anthony, surrogate father to the doomed Prince Edward and his brother Dickon; and that of present-day historian Una Pryor. Orphaned, and herself brought up in a family where secrets and rivalries threaten her world, Una's experience of tragedy, betrayal and lost love help her unlock the long-buried secrets that led to the princes' deaths.

Weaving their stories together, Emma Darwin brilliantly evokes how the violence and glamour of past ages live on within our present.

A Secret Alchemy has been named one of The Times Best Paperbacks of 2009

You are getting buried in plaudits. This is another I shall have to buy after Christmas. If you would kindly write another that will be ready for when I finish your current two, I would be grateful, lol. Well done again Emma. There is no doubt about it, you can write extremely well.

Sorry, I read this ages ago. Rather good, I thought. You'll have to write another.

I also live v close to where much of the tale is set. I even went out checking your geography.

A Secret Alchemy appeals to both the heart and the head. It's a fantastic read, but also poses, and in it's own substance, answers some interesting questions. I came to the novel expecting, 'What happened to the princes in the tower?' but this is scratching the surface. One question is implied by one of the narrators, 'Why fictionalise past events?' The reader participates in three lives, and therein lies the answer.

Alan, I hope I got the geography right!

And thanks, John!

Extract here:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/a-secret-alchemy-an-extract.html

Hi Emma,
I've just finished this - and enjoyed it very much. You've created an atmosphere of the 1400s such that I really felt the instability of kingship, the tenuous hold on life, and a real sense of history - and on-going human emotions, which ultimately aren't so very different.
That period is a bit of a black hole for me - names, dates, battles - without anything to clothe them with - until now; but at last it's stuck - just watch out, Mastermind!
Mini-micro grumble that in the historical story, I didn't know where the places were until very late on - they were often riding to/from London - in which direction??? I imagined them around Cambridge and Norfolk, the Cotswolds, East Anglia, Oxford-ish - and only latterly realised they were Northhampton-ish.
As for the present day story - I'm happily familiar with the locations but have never visited them - now I have a reason to, and it will mean something to me.
Back to the past - I was astonished that a king's marriage could be in secret, but I suppose the nature of kings was very different. I was touched by Anthony's story - riding to his death - and his certainty in the afterlife made me wistful. And your solution for the missing princes sounds entirely plausible; as was the aftermath for Elysabeth, which was so moving. That Nasty Richard III - how could he?
How on earth do you do your research? And did Anthony's letter (that Una found) really exist? And where, exactly, is The Chantry? Did they get funding to restore it and do they do open days?
There was some delightful writing; one description that stays with me? Her skin shivered.
Thoroughly good read, and rare for me these days, so well done and thank you.
Whisks
P.S. Stephen Fairhurst (from TMOL) pitches up again - albeit in a whole different guise and 3-400 years before the TMOL soldier - but thoroughly believable and engrossing. Do you have a cunning plan to plant him in all your novels? Perhaps come out with a flourish some years down the line, and write on the heredity and genealogy and incarnations of Stephen Fairhurst?

Hi Whisks - I'm so glad you enjoyed it, and thank you for bothering with such a lovely appreciation. With one novel about to go out (eek!) , and another I'm about to start (help!), it's nice to be reminded that I have got it right in the past, once or twice...

It is a fiendishly complicated period, and it was a real challenge to keep the reader understanding what and why things mattered so much, and not confused, without sinking the storytelling under slabs of info... Did I not give enough signposts? It's always difficult with real, but small places. "We lay at Northampton on our way home to Grafton" doesn't orient everyone (Specially not me. Being a diplo-brat, my English geography was non-existent until I was in my twenties, so I'm bad at knowing what readers will and won't know.)

The thing with kingship at that date is that it's personal: who the king is and how he behaves really makes a difference, and to that extent he can do what he likes. And if he chooses to go off without telling anyone and get married, there's nothing anyone can do to stop him. He was only 21, after all...

The Stephen Fairhurst reference was mostly just fun for readers of TMOL, but sort-of a point as well, that all those people have descendants now, and names and genes go on. Though Fairhurst isn't a terribly Yorkshire surname, so I imagined his mother having fallen for a yeoman soldier from Suffolk, who came north to Sheriff Hutton with Richard of Warwick, say, years ago. The novel I'm about to start is placed in Suffolk, between the two times of TMOL. Haven't yet decided if there'll be any Fairhursts in that, but it's possible.