I researched The Dark Days Pact with as much fervour and delight as I did the first book in the series, The Dark Days Club, and I possibly had even more fun.
In The Dark Days Pact I have once again mixed real 1812 world events with my own fiction, and a number of the characters are historical figures.
Martha Gunn was a real dipper in Brighton and, by all accounts, in 1812 she was still dipping at the grand old age of eighty-six. She is a fascinating figure; a celebrity within her own lifetime, and a favourite of the Prince Regent, who was so fond of her that he gave her lifetime access to the largesse of his Brighton Pavilion kitchens. She was called the Queen of the Dippers and many of her descendants still live in the Brighton area. I hope they enjoy and approve of my depiction of their marvellous ancestor.
The Comte and Comtesse d’Antraigues are also historical figures, as is Lawrence, the Comte’s Italian valet. The Comte and Comtesse were really murdered by Lawrence on 22 July 1812, and Lawrence then committed suicide (or so it is reported). The Comte was a known spy who seems to have worked for nearly everybody, including the French royalists, the Spanish, the Russians and the English; in some cases, at the same time. His wife was a former Paris Opera star and, it would seem, a rather formidable woman. Together they fled France, survived arrest and interrogation by Napoleon, lived in Vienna and ended up in Barnes Terrace in England. Their murder is as mysterious today as it was in 1812. At the time, Lawrence’s actions and his subsequent suicide were put down to the “passionate nature” of Italians, but the reason why he brutally murdered his employers and then shot himself was never really discovered. It is now supposed that the murders were in fact assassinations prompted by the Comte’s spying activities, but even that is not certain. Whatever the case, the sequence of events in the d’Antraigues house on that morning were very odd and made more confusing by the conflicting eyewitness accounts reported in the newspapers of the time. I must confess that I have slightly altered the sequence of events to fit my fictional action, but for the most part the actions of Lawrence, the Comte and Comtesse, and their servants are as reported in the newspapers and the inquest report. Also, in the interest of accuracy, it is quite possible that the Comte and Lawrence were not, in fact, Deceivers.
As a side note, I visited the house where the murders occurred. It is still standing alongside the Thames in Barnes Terrace and is now called D’Antraigues. The White Hart pub where the bodies were taken is also still there. In the absence of any centralised city mortuary, pubs were used for coroner’s inquests because they had cool rooms in which to store the bodies of the dead. (I’ll have a beer with that corpse, please!)
Other real-life figures who are mentioned include: the Prince Regent; Queen Charlotte; Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary; Mr Ryder, the Home Secretary prior to Lord Sidmouth; Mr Wedgwood; and Comte Julien, the d’Antraigues’ son (also known as Jules). The wonderfully named Committee for Secrecy was also real, and included Mr Canning and Mr Wilberforce, the famous abolitionist.
For me, the town of Brighton in 1812 is like another historical figure. Most of the places that are mentioned or that Helen visits were real, such as Donaldson’s Circulating Library, Raggett’s Club, the Castle Tavern, The Steine, Awsiter’s Baths, The Lanes including Union Street, and of course, the Marine Pavilion, the Prince Regent’s favourite palace. In 1812 it was not yet the Royal Pavilion, the magnificent Chinese/Indian frivolity that still stands today in Brighton. Those extensive renovations did not begin until 1815, and so the palace that Helen sees is still the classically designed Marine Pavilion. For my descriptions of Brighton, I used a Guide to All the Watering and Sea Bathing Places for 1813 by John Feltham, and Sickelmore’s An Epitome of Brighton (which includes a map of Brighton from the time), and I made a number of visits to modern Brighton. For those who may be interested, German Place where Helen and her comrades live is now Madeira Place, renamed for patriotic reasons during the First World War.
I have taken a little liberty with the addition of the molly rooms to Kate Holt’s bawdy-house. From my research, it is not outside the realms of possibility that molly rooms were also incorporated within a more traditional bawdy-house. However, in most cases separate molly houses existed and, because of the deadly laws against homosexuality, these houses were kept secret and could be disbanded very quickly if the house was under surveillance or a Watch spy tried to enter. Brighton’s proximity to the army barracks and its status as a resort resulted in numerous bawdy-houses, and my research reinforced the troubling fact that it would not have been unusual for a girl of Sprat’s age to be found working in them.
On a less serious note, the cant language used by Mr Hammond, Sprat, Binny, Kate Holt, Lowry and, on occasion, Helen comes mostly from Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue written by Francis Grose and updated by Pierce Egan. It was published in 1785, and revised in 1811 and 1823, and is now available free online. The dictionary is a fascinating journey back to the Regency era and I wish I could have used more of the hilarious words and phrases, although a good number of them are quite obscene. Here are a few of the more respectable examples that didn’t suit the book but that I just have to share with you:
Chatter-broth: tea
Squeeze-crab: a sour-looking shrivelled fellow
Snilch: to look at something attentively
Out of print: slang used by booksellers to describe someone who is dead
This last one cracks me up every time!
As with Book 1 in the series, if you would like to learn a bit more about my research, you can do so on my website at www.darkdaysclub.com and on my Pinterest page at pinterest.com/alisongoodman
Alison Goodman, October 2016