Alison and I walked back through the church. I hoped that Penny had been able to stand in the stillness and be with Diana one last time, and remember, and tell her that there was nothing to forgive. I spoke the words I had read in the margin of the photograph, my voice no louder than the whisper of my own breath.
“Like me shall be the shuddering calm of night.”
It was dusk. The sky had cleared and the air had started to cool and crispen.
“She’s gone,” I said.
“I know,” said Alison.
We drove away from Barbroke, just two more angels in the darkening blue.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
& SECRET TREASURES
In making any attempt to list all the friends and family to whom I owe so much gratitude, I should be assured only of failure. It is my fervent hope that I have already thanked them personally and my express wish that they feel free to blight my email with justifiable vitriol, if I have not.
I am indebted to every member of the wonderful team at Unbound. I should particularly like to thank: John Mitchinson, for expressing such enthusiasm and support for the publishing of the novel; Philip Connor and Georgia Odd, for guiding the book on its initial, faltering steps into the world; Elizabeth Garner, for insightful editing married with a gift for drawing out the best of my abilities; and Anna Simpson and DeAndra Lupu, for managing the entire editing process with such sympathy to the text, and for putting up with my rarely-warranted stress.
Thank you, too, to my agent at Felicity Bryan Associates, Caroline Wood, for all her help, advice and patience. And to Felicity Bryan herself, for listening to my wild talk about All the Perverse Angels on a Tube journey from Angel to Baker Street, and for subsequently bringing me into the FBA fold.
Writing the novel involved a lot of research. Here are a few books in which you might be interested. Any errors in the novel are, of course, my own—although I shall probably blame them on Anna or Penny—and not the fault of the authors below.
The artworks in the book, with one notable exception, are all available online, where you will also find the guidebooks used by Penny and Diana: Alden’s Oxford Guide (Alden), Handbook Guide for the University Galleries (Fisher), Facsimiles of Original Studies by Michael Angelo (Bell & Daldy), and Drawings and Studies by Raffaelle Sanzio (George Bell & Sons). Matthew’s letter to Penny draws on The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts MDCCCLXXXVII (Wm. Clowes & Sons) and The Magazine of Art (Cassell), again both online. Not online, but without equal, is Pre-Raphaelite Painting Techniques: 1848-56 by Joyce H. Townsend, Jacqueline Ridge and Stephen Hackney (Tate Publishing). I can also recommend Paula Gillett’s Worlds of Art: Painters in Victorian Society (Rutgers University Press).
When it comes to poetry, you may not be able to get your hands on a Moxon edition of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, as owned by Diana: only one thousand were published and all were rapidly withdrawn from sale when scandal descended. However, it is available in Poems and Ballads & Atalanta in Calydon, edited by Kenneth Haynes (Penguin Classics), or can be found online. If you would like to know more about the poet himself, try Rikky Rooksby’s A.C. Swinburne: A Poet’s Life (Scolar Press). Penny paraphrases Whitman in a couple of places—her spelling of “loafe” is not a mistake—and you can find his Leaves of Grass online. If you want to buy a copy, I’d recommend one of the cheap facsimiles of the 1855 edition, though others would doubtless disagree.
All of the books which precede Warber’s Straunge Hystory can be found online in editions which existed in 1887, including Bourchier’s The Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux for the Early English Text Society. Schweigel’s German translation of Esclarmonde, Clarisse et Florent, Yde et Olive (N.G. Elwert) includes the French text of “Chanson d’Yde et Olive”. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is included in Walker’s Corpus Poetarum Latinorum (George Bell & Sons), and there are many online translations. Also online is the Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis in Xylander’s Transformationum Congeries. If you’d like a translation of that—unavailable to Penny—then seek out a copy of Francis Celoria’s The Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis (Routledge).
If you would like to read more about the first women to study at the University of Oxford, Vera Brittain’s The Women at Oxford: A Fragment of History (Macmillan) is online. So, too, are The Accounts of the Ordinary of Newgate, which provide contemporaneous, and often disturbing, records of the hangings at Tyburn.
Finally, “Danaette”—the story which Anna quotes, and from which the title of the book is taken—can be read in French Decadent Tales, translated by Stephen Romer (Oxford World’s Classics). It is available in the original French in Remy de Gourmont: Histoires magiques (Petite Bibliothèque Ombres).
LIST OF SUPPORTERS
Unbound is a new kind of publishing house. Our books are funded directly by readers. This was a very popular idea during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Now we have revived it for the internet age. It allows authors to write the books they really want to write and readers to support the writing they would most like to see published.
The names listed below are readers who pledged their support and made this book happen. If you’d like to join them, visit www.unbound.com.
The author would like to express her personal gratitude to all the individuals listed, without whom the first edition of All the Perverse Angels could not have been published by Unbound.
Author’s Circle
the McCallum family
Douglas & Margaret
John & Heather
Kelly & Rodrigo
David & Natalie
Sergio M.L. Tarrero
Robert Zeps
Patrons
Rodrigo Barroso
Pauline Batty
Jeff Boison
Evelyn Brown
Peter Brown
Sandra Cheetham
Laura Clemons
Aubrey de Grey
Ann Flower
Karen Hendrickx
Daniel Hook
Michael Kope
Simone Libman
Evelyn Marr
Luís Melo Dos Santos
Kim Ohh
Daniele Orner Ginor
Eduardo Pellegrino
Darren Reynolds
Garret Smyth
Doug Weiser
Supporters
Julia Adair
Bernard Alabaster
Charlie Amor
Kristian Andresen
Stephanie Aretz
Sandra Armor
Rachel Armstrong
Mike Auty
Susan Auty
Catherine B.
Karen Baines
Rives Dalley Barbour
Chris Barrett
Lisa Beal
Adrian Belcher
Oliver Bell
Emli Bendixen
Penny Benford
Barry Bentley
Kirstin MacKenzie Berge
S. Bear Bergman
Louise Blinkhorn
Matthew Booth
Mark Bowsher
Sara Jane Boyers
Keeley Bunting
Toria Buzza
Eleni Calligas
Adelaide Carpenter
Marie Caswell
Elaine Chambers
John Luke Chapman
Laura Clarke
Pamela Clayton
James Wm Clement
Ronete Cohen
Bill Colegrave
Stevyn Colgan
Malcolm Comley
Katie Commodore
Harald Cools
Anne Corwin
Alison Costigan
Jan Court
Pete Cumberland
Harriet Cunningham
Ryan Curry
Christopher Curtis-Nurisso
Laurent Curtis-Nurisso
Steven D’Souza
Nelly Dader
Tori Darcy
Jo Davies
David DeMember
Jameson Detweiler
Kevin Dewalt
Larissa Doswell
Emma Doyle
Haidée Drew
Aine Duffy
Vivienne Dunstan
Christine Ellis
Maria Entraigues Abramson
Erasmus
Lisa Evans
Lisa Fabiny
Charlotte Featherstone
Naomi Frisby
James Frye
Sophie Fuller
Billy Furey
Colin Furey
Beth Gallego
Kate Gardiner
Laura-Jo Gartside
Ina German
Beata Górska
Amara Graps
Silvia Gravina
Darrell Gullion
Patricia Giangrande Hamila
Dream Hampton
Nova Han
Happy Birthtime!
Baylea Hart
Barry Hasler
Janel Hayley
Maggi Healey
David Hebblethwaite
Linda Hepper
Elizabeth Hewitt
E. O. Higgins
Lucy C. Hirst
Richard Hodkinson
Paul Holbrook
John Holden
Roger Holzberg
Mark Hood
Richard Hope-Smith
Henry Horenstein
Paul Hynek
Cathy Imber
James Imber
Suzie Imber
Julie Impens
Maxim Jago
Alice Jolly
Daniel Jones
Branka Juran
Nik Kealy
Tyler Kellogg
Kari Kelly
Dan Kieran
Jill Kieran
Lindsay Kightley
Trudy Kightley
Patrick Kincaid
John Kluge
Ben Kohn
Abbey Kos
Maxime Kraus
Cassidy Krug
Kirsten Kruse
Catarina Lamm
Laurence Lawson
Mikey Lee
Jo Lee-Reynolds
Amy Lehman
Sarah Lessen
Jay Lewis
William ☯Liao
Caroline Libman
Martin Libman
Myra Libman
Christen Lien
Gretchen Lindemann
Leon Little
Barbara Logan
Peter Mandeno
Allen Manser
Usman Mansoor
Tracey Marion
Diane McCallum
Stephen McGowan
Dario Meli
Hamutal Meridor
Arian Mirzarafie-Ahi
John Mitchinson
Guy Montrose
Amanda Morrell
Maggie Murphy
Carlo Navato
Philippe van Nedervelde
Christine Joy Nichols
Bruno Noble
Oki O’Connor
Corey M. O’Hara
Myra Ottley
Andrew Pack
Blair Palmer
Lev Parikian
Julia Parker
Robyn Pearson
Kevin Perrott
Kate Pierce
Justin Pollard
Kacy Qua
Nicky Quint
Victoria Ramsay
S.A. Rennie
Cheryl Reynolds
Freda Reynolds
Jo Richardson
Julia Richdale-Ellis
Holly Rutan
Rosally Sapla
Zoë Schlanger
Nicole Scott
Jennifer Seale
Ruth Selman
Emily Prudence Shore
Niall Slater
Wendy Southern
Paul Spiegel
Janice Staines
Tabatha Stirling
Liz Stoelker
Christina Strickland
Helen Taylor
Maria Tejada
Louise Theodosiou
Mary Thomas
Mat Tobin
Prema Trettin
Zoë Tryon
Jennifer Tubbs
John Anthony Vaughan
Joao Vidigal
Natasha Vita-More
Matthew Waldman
Stan C. Waterman
Denise Watson
Noshua Watson
Aileen Webber
James Webber
Peter Webber
Joyce Webster
Kathryn West
Gaynor Whyles
Caryl Williams
Kate Williamson
Derek Wilson
David Woof
Andy Wright
Allan Wyatt
Benjamin Zealley
This edition first published in 2018
Unbound
6th Floor Mutual House, 70 Conduit Street, London W1S 2GF
www.unbound.com
All rights reserved
© Sarah K. Marr, 2018
The right of Sarah K. Marr to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Chapter Twenty-Six is adapted from “The Accounts of the Ordinary of Newgate” of 1676 and 1677. While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publisher would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgments in any further editions.
This is a work of fiction. All characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text Design by Ellipsis
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78352-444-0 (trade hbk)
ISBN 978-1-78352-445-7 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-78352-443-3 (limited edition)
All the Perverse Angels Page 30