The novella is making a serious comeback in horror just as it is in science fiction and here's another story that does all it needs to in under a hundred and fifty pages without being pressured to pad out to double that. It's a historical story too, set in London in 1675, which is rather unfortunate for its leading lady, Sarah Davis, given who and what she is, from the obvious to the hidden.
Most obviously, she's a woman at a time when they had precious few rights of their own and knew their place. She's also an outcast from her village who's travelled to London on her own and found work as an apprentice midwife, working for a lady called Mrs. June; because the birthing room is very much one of the places that's considered not only appropriate for women but also inappropriate for men. Mrs. June happens to belong to a small group of midwives who call themselves a guild, the Worshipful Company of Midwives, but only in secret because they aren't official and can't be, on account of having vaginas. Doing so in public would be a hanging offence, even before the powers-that-be realise that these particular midwives are also witches.
Mrs. June is only a minor witch, able to direct enough power from somewhere to heal torn skin during a tough birth, but little more. Sarah, on the other hand, is special. She kinda-sorta killed her own husband with a spell that she didn't realise that she was even casting. She has no control over her power, but Mrs. June senses it in her and that's precisely why she took her on as her apprentice. We have to wonder if some of this is to do with the fact that Sarah was also born different, with a tail that her grandmother swiftly cut off before the doctor could notice and do something far more severe.
We wonder that because being special isn't particularly special any more. Babies are being born mutated, in a variety of ways, all across London. Many die at birth or were already dead before being delivered, like the one that's born dead in the very first sentence of the book, with gills on its face and scales down its back. This particular one is delivered by Mrs. June with Sarah's help and she wonders if it could have been saved, maybe by getting it into water quickly, but the truth is that most could not. Some, of course, are helped on their way, because this is a London where religion is far more important than science and these babies, therefore, count as abominations in the eyes of God.
The question that we have to ask, of course, being from the twentieth century rather than the seventeenth, is why. This doesn't appear to have previously been a common thing at all, really starting after the Great Fire of London in 1666 and continuing to grow in frequency over the succeeding decade. And, if we think that's only a coincidence, let me introduce Sir Christopher Wren and the Monument that he built to commemorate it. Lina Rather doesn't go into a lot of historical detail, but it's 202 feet high and stands 202 feet west of the bakery of Thomas Farriner, where the fire started, on the site of St. Margaret's, the first church to be destroyed.
What Rather does instead is to provide a deeper and more occult meaning to the Monument and its location, suggesting that Sir Christopher included a spacious laboratory beneath it for a very specific purpose, to which we become privy when he explains it to Sarah. Now, why would the Surveyor of the King's Works be chatting to an apprentice midwife? Well, his wife Faith is pregnant and a chance encounter in the street led her Ladyship to hire Sarah to deliver her baby. One thing leads to another and, before we know it, Sir Christopher recounts his theories to Sarah in his laboratory beneath the Monument and we realise what we're truly dealing with.
It seems that these births are far from a curious set of departures from the norm. Something is happening, a thing that's explained to Sarah and therefore us in two very different ways by two very different people with two very different agendas and thus two very different opinions on what to do about it. Because of who she is and what she is, she's torn between the two approaches and this novella gradually morphs into her choice and her reasoning why. The fact that she's apparently bisexual and feels a strong attraction to Margaret, who's a special young lady herself, may or may not help her decide one way or the other.
I found this book fascinating. It's rare to read historical horror that goes this far back, that subgenre usually content with the Victorian era because of its gothic overtones and the opportunities that arise from so many leaps forward in the arts and sciences. Change is always a fertile bed for genre fiction and massive change is a true gift. However, Rather finds that here in earlier history, a great fire that destroyed much of the greatest city in the nation and Sir Christopher Wren, a polymath whose personal history demonstrates how easy it is to see how this book took flight for the author.
For instance, Faith Wren died in 1675 and little is known of her but the only letter from her known to exist has a section about a watch that she's sent to him, with a telling line: "for I have put such a spell into it; that every Beating of the Balance will tell you 'tis the Pulse of My Heart." Sure, it's just a love letter but it's easy to read something more into that. Wren was an open-minded experimental scientist, co-founding the Royal Society in 1662, and he was politically active, serving four terms as member of parliament, though the first wasn't until 1685, so after the events of this book.
Of course, Rather abstracts her reasoning and just introduces us to the characters, London as much one as Sir Christopher. In fact, the period setting is very comfortable to modern readers, without omitting details that help ground it in its time. Should we care, we can notice vocabulary and phrasing that seems strange to us, so look it up and be able to read deeper. Should we not, we can ignore it and let the flow of the story roll over us without interruption. That's entirely our choice and the book doesn't suffer either way.
I find this sort of thing fascinating, so went with the latter approach while reading but also took a few notes in the spirit of the former, looking them up later. For instance, I've worn mittens in my day, but, being male and not from the seventeenth century, I never wore a tippet with them, which is a long ladies' scarf. I never had to tie on a pocket, unless my sporran counts, but that was a common practice for women for a few centuries. I've never drunk sack posset, but it's a dry fortified wine from Portugal, so I should probably try it. I don't believe my friends on the LGBTQ+ spectrum have ever described themselves as tribades and sodomites, but that was the terminology at a point in time, the latter also colloquially known as mollie boys here.
I haven't read anything by Rather before, but she seems to be known for her novellas. She began with 'Sisters of the Vast Black', which is apparently about "nuns living on a giant slug in outer space". Having now read this, a cosmic horror novella in a sense but one that's very grounded in historical London, I'm eager to find out what she does in that and its sequel, 'Sister of the Forsaken Stars'. ~~ Hal C F Astell
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