One of the many joys of publishing my novels
on Kindle and in Paperback with Room to Write is watching my recent publications
trickle out week by week.
I don’t subscribe to the notion that publishing on
Kindle will lead to thousands of sales
but it’s still a delight for a writer to know that someone in Aberdeen or London
or Tunbridge Wells is buying and reading – and I hope enjoying - my stories. If you are she or he – here is a
great thank-you!
So in this way it’s great to know that people
are buying and reading my two latest novels Writing
at the Maison Bleue and The
Pathfinder.
But I am now intrigued to notice that among these
more recent
titles readers out there are now buying copies of A Woman Scorned which was published
a decade ago.
This marvellous development probably has
something to do with the fact that subtitle to A Woman Scorned is; Serial
Killer or Scandal Victim? I am aware
that serial killers have something of a hold on people’s imaginations in these insecure
modern times.
I also note that there is to be a forthcoming TV
drama based on the story of Mary Ann Cotton. I hope the film makes don’t roll
out the usual stereotyped macabre melodrama which would confirm the fact that we’ve
made no progress at all in our understanding of this woman and the times in
which we lived.
In my novel, I put the case for the
defence of Mary Ann Cotton, who was alleged to
have killed at least three and at most eighteen people in the mid
nineteenth century. Hanged for her ‘crime’ in Durham Goal, she has become
a dark legend in the north as our very own female serial killer. Mary Ann
Cotton lived a mile from my house. There is even a nursery rhyme which begins Mary Ann Cotton, she’s dead and she’s rotten.
I have to say that part of the fun of writing historical fiction is delving
into the research. Every one of my novels has required me to get not just the
facts right, but also the feeling.
The facts are often easy – laid out there in histories and argued about
in learned articles. Of course contemporary press reports, court data, images, diaries
and letters are great for that specific 'feeling' research. This art of
gathering materials to illuminate feelings and world-views of a particular time plays an important
role in creating fiction around a real event.
To my mind the charismatic itinerant
nurse Mary Ann Cotton is as worthy of this process as Henry the Eighth.
A Woman Scorned was to be a work of fiction, but inspired and informed
by a detailed study of the papers the records and the real people and events
surrounding the trial and execution of Mary Ann Cotton in 1873.
The newspapers were a strident then
as they are now. This trial became a national sensation reported in lurid terms
assuming her guilt well before the actual trial.
Looking for some balance I was pleased at the extent of the detail available. Newspapers, like the court and the
police reports, which I also read, involved verbatim accounts where you can
hear not just what people say but just how
they say it.
Interestingly in these Mary Ann Cotton years, Charles Dickens as a young
man was a trained court shorthand writer. This is where he must have honed his
ear for intricacies of accent, semantics and idiosyncrasies of speech.
I had actually started to research and write this novel assuming the
basic rightness of the myth. I started out feeling that the Mary Ann Cotton
event could make a very good novel.
But my perspective on her case changed as I read of the judgemental public
pre-trial outcry and noted the idle carelessness of Mary Ann’s first solicitors
who gave her very bad advice, obviously having assumed her guilt, and neglected
her proper defence and even robbed her of money.
I eventually realised that modern rules on forensic medicine would have
blown out the forensic evidence presented here as ‘proof’ of her guilt. At one
point to enable a re-examination, the viscera of one ‘victim’ they dug up out of the bare earth where they had
been buried in the doctor’s garden. Unreliable evidence indeed.
And then there was this very big gun was imported into the case in the
form of barrister Sir Charles Russell (see my footnote *) made the long journey north
to mount the prosecution of this bold, pretty woman, this outsider in a very
tight old-fashioned village where deaths were common from the diseases of
poverty, including the scourge of typhoid.
So it dawned on me that by modern standards of justice this case was at
least unproven.
A Woman Scorned makes the case that Mary Ann was probably not guilty but rather was the
victim of rising hysteria in the region and in the country, creating a powerful
and enduring myth which put on a false cloak of hard truth.
I know from response from my readers that the novel has changed a few
other minds too. Perhaps you might like to see what you think?
And in my heart I hope the film makers incorporate a fresh perspective on the fascinating case of Mary
Ann Cotton.
To give you a taste of the story here are two excerpts.
The story is told through the eyes of
Victoria Kilburn, niece of Doctor Kilburn the doctor central to the story. She
is visiting her uncle from London and is delighted and eventually horrified at
what she witnesses in this small Durham village. Like Mary Ann she is an
outsider and it is she who witnesses the runaway injustice visited on this unusual
and charismatic woman.
Excerpt One:
Victoria encounters Mary Ann
… The porter had taken my hand
luggage and settled me in the solitary First Class carriage. I was sitting
there in secluded splendour when the door was wrenched open and a pale-faced
woman peered in. She pushed a heavy bag and a basket onto the floor of the
compartment and lifted a fragile boy of eight or so into the carriage. Then she
leapt lightly up the steps herself and settled into the corner opposite to me.
I choked for a second on the scent of fruitcake and almonds, with some kind of
back-smoke of lavender and honeysuckle. She filled the whole carriage with her
perfume and earthy warmth.
I turned to stare out of the window,
but not before I’d taken in the image of a woman of thirty or so, of taller
than average height with thick glossy black hair under a rather becoming
bonnet. She wore a surprisingly fine paisley shawl and - finely polished although
stitched and mended – small button boots. Instinctively I pulled my own boot,
with its built- up instep, further under the hem of my skirt.
Staring at the puffs of steam
dissolving into trails of vapour that streamed past the window I wonder at the
audacity of this unlikely woman in entering a first class carriage. Then her
voice, low and surprisingly well modulated, cuts through the air between us.
‘And how have you been these past days, honey?’
In the silence that follows I realise
that the woman is talking to me. I turn my gaze to meet the darkest blue eyes,
large and shining in a perfect oval of a face. Now I see that she is actually
quite beautiful, despite the workaday clothes. I want to smile and my cheeks
feel hot.
‘Well, honey?’ she says….
Excerpt Two:
Here is Victoria having tea with a new
acquaintance Kit Dawson:
… After the usual pleasantries about the
weather (gloomy) and our own health (blooming), Kit Dawson tells me a tale
about his day sitting at Mr Chapman’s elbow in the local magistrate’s court,
making notes regarding a case about two women in West Auckland who came to
blows over the abuse of a washing line, and renewed the battle again in court
only to be fined five shillings each and bound over to keep the peace.
He thinks
this is very funny, but I am concerned at the fine. ‘That would mean such a lot
of money to these women. Two week’s wages for Lizzie, my aunt’s maid.’
Kit Dawson
is entirely indifferent about this. ‘If they care about that, they shouldn’t
start bashing each other. They’re barbarians, every last one of them.’
I shake my
head. ‘Mr Dawson. To be poor is a misfortune, not a sign of barbarism.’ I
regret the primness of my tone but mean what I say.
To my
surprise he laughs. ‘Ah, you live a protected life, Miss Victoria. You should
see what I see in court! Drunken miners, low women, thieves and vagabonds,
wife-beating husbands, husband-beating wives. For me it’s like that first, most
absurd circle of Hell in that courtroom...’
Footnote *
Interestingly in1889, seventeen years after this case, Sir Charles
Russell, Mary Ann’s prosecutor, defended the middle class Florence Maybrick
against a charge of poisoning her husband with arsenic. Amongst other legal
strategies he touched on some of the arguments employed by Mr Campbell Foster
in the Mary Ann Cotton case. Russell seemed to be on the verge of securing an
acquittal when Maybrick destroyed her own case by making a statement admitting
a degree of culpability. Unlike Mary Ann, Maybrick was not hanged. She served
fifteen years in prison and lived to an old age in the United States. Russell
later became an MP, then Attorney General in Gladstone’s ministries of 1886 and
1892, ending up as Lord Chief Justice of England in 1894.
The case has had its historians. Arthur Appleton, in his book, Mary Ann Cotton concluded that Mary Ann
probably killed 14 or 15 people. Tony Whitehead, whose well documented account
Mary Ann Cotton, Dead But Not
Forgotten is presented in rigorous style but in the end – in my
view, unable to deny the power of the myth - he almost drifts to the conclusion
that Mary Ann was probably guilty in three cases.
