The Thameside borough of Southwark, 1597. Kit Skevy aged 20, is a street criminal employed – or perhaps enslaved – by a man whose trade would, in our day, be described as gangster. Will Twentyman is feared for his violence and venality. He also controls Mariner Elgin. A few years older than Kit, she is a cut-purse, a thief who specialises in relieving wealthy people of their cash. She has a complex history, having once worked on a sailing ship disguised as a boy. When her first menstruation betrayed her, she was locked up for the remainder of the voyage, and now belongs to Twentyman.
One of Twentyman’s more profitable sidelines is grave robbery, delivering corpses to anatomists or those engaged in alchemy. When a group of armed men discover Kit and Mariner exhuming a body, Kit happens to be carrying a vial of a strange substance he recovered from the body of a friend who died in a fire caused by an alchemical experiment. The vial breaks and the the liquid, perhaps something like phosphorus, ignites and plays across his fingers.
Kit is taken prisoner and his captors, wrongly, believe that he has strange powers. Kit learns that his captor is Lord Isherwood, but the nobleman’s son, Lazarus – himself an alchemist in search of hidden truths, befriends him, and orchestrates his escape. Perhaps ‘befriends him’ is euphemistic, as there is an erotic attraction between the two of them.
At one point, Emma Hinds suggests that Kit may have the anatomical irregularity of possessing both male and female characteristics. The author describes herself as “a Queer writer and playwright living in Manchester whose work explores untold feminist narratives”, so this novel is not a run-of-the-mill historical tale. Mariner also escapes from Twentyman’s grip after being drawn to Lady Elody Blackwater, a wealthy widow who is also consumed by the search for the elixirs of alchemy. There is sexual electricity between the two women and, despite their social differences, they become lovers. There is a thread of eroticism running through this book, which is unusual in ostensibly similar historical fiction.
In the last few pages of the novel we are drawn into the burgeoning world of late Elizabethan theatre, and we are introduced to an ambitious actor/playwright from Warwickshire. Emma Hinds brings us a vivid (and sometimes lurid) vision of a dystopian late-Elizabethan – era London, peopled by whore-masters, alchemists, body snatchers, cut-purses and political opportunists. Kit and Mariner are unconventional heroes. If nothing else, they are street fighters who know all the tricks to enable them to survive in a Southwark so grotesque that it might have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch.
The contrast between the middens initially occupied by Kit and Mariner, and the rose-water life style of the gentry could not be starker. The relationship between the two is that of brother and sister as each is attracted to people of their own sex. The Quick and The Dead is a complex and, in some ways, a challenging, novel. Emma Hinds has clearly spent long hours on the topography of late 17thC London, and the bizarre attempts by alchemists to attempt things which science would eventally prove to be impossible.. It was only in the age of Newton, a century later, that the work of alchemists was finally sidelined.
The author also reminds us that despite the heroics of Drake, and the fortuitous weather, Spanish/Catholic claims to the crown of England did not end in 1588. As Kit and Mariner go from crisis to crisis, a second Spanish invasion fleet is waiting at anchor in the middle distance. The Queen would only have another four years to live, and the agents of Scotland’s King James are already busy.
This is a compelling portrait of late Elizabethan England, an absorbing mix of fierce politics, wonderful architecture and drama, but sullied by bestial social conditions. Emma Hinds seems to be telling us that same-sex relationships were, in those days, not the burning issue that they were later to become. She may be right. In the novel the name of Christopher Marlowe is occasionally evoked, and one school of thought suggests that homosexuality brought about his downfall but, whatever his preferences, he was not hunted down in the way that Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing were to be in more recent times. The Quick and The Dead is publlshed by Bedord Square and available now.
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