Texas author Raybourn feels the pull of Victorian England
Latest Veronica Speedwell novel dives into murder with royal ties
Veronica Speedwell belongs to that niche of Victorianera women determined to escape their fate as so-called “hearth angels.” She is also fictional.
Such strong-willed, adventurous women happen to be Deanna Raybourn’s specialty. The successful novelist, whose 20plus books include this month’s fifth Speedwell mystery, “A Murderous Relation,” has been studying this mountain-climbing, butterfly-chasing sorority for about 25 years.
“The more I read about them, the more fascinated I became,” says Raybourn, who grew up in San Antonio. “We always have this idea that Victorian women were always sitting in the parlor, serving tea to the vicar and knitting. But there was a subset of women who packed up their parasols and their petticoats and hit the road.”
According to Raybourn, Veronica is most directly patterned after Margaret Fountaine. Left well-to-do in her late twenties by the death of an uncle, this Norfolk vicar’s daughter traveled to every corner of the British Empire and collected some 22,000 specimens during her lifetime.
“You could make a pretty good living going out and catching specimens of whatever it is people were collecting, and butterflies happened to be a particularly ladylike thing to collect,” explains Raybourn, who now lives in Virginia. “And they were easy. Face it: if you hunt a butterfly, all you need is a net and a killing jar; you don’t need a pair of Purdey shotguns.”
Decades after her death in 1940, Fountaine’s exhaustive diaries were adapted into the memoirs “Love Among the Butterflies” and “Butterflies and Late Loves.” The books’ editor largely obscured Fountaine’s butterfly pursuits in favor of her previously unknown sexual exploits; Raybourn gave Veronica a similarly vigorous carnal appetite.
“She’s very self-actualized, very strong, she has these kind of aromantic physical relationships,” Raybourn says of her heroine. “For her, sex is exercise. It’s something healthgiving and invigorating, like a brisk walk in the morning air, and so she doesn’t tend to get entangled with people. It leaves her free to pursue her other passions.”
Besides lepidoptery, those other passions include solving murders.
Veronica and her partner Stoker — a brooding, chiseled, well-bred taxidermist — live on an estate in London’s posh Marylebone district (location of 221B Baker Street, by the way). While helping classify and restore generations of their wealthy patron’s family hunting trophies and other zoological finds, the pair frequently find themselves called away to investigate misdeeds among the Victorian elite.
These assignments also serve as a convenient distraction from Veronica and Stoker’s obvious attraction to one another. They are both headstrong and intuitive, and Raybourn sets the tension between them just below the boiling point.
“There’s a mental shorthand between them on a fundamental, cellular level,” she says. “They get each other. I think in one of the books Veronica even makes mention of the fact that other people are mud and that they are quicksilver. They’re a different element.”
In “A Murderous Relation,” Veronica and Stoker’s wellconnected friend Lady Wellington asks the two to retrieve an irreplaceable jewel that Prince Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s grandson, has foolishly given to his mistress. The prince, known as “Eddy,” was a bit of a black sheep in the royal family at the time.
“That’s one of the drawbacks to having a hereditary monarchy — sometimes you end up with really capable people sitting on the throne,” Raybourn says. “And then other times you just get this genetic roll of the dice and you’re like, ‘Wow … this was not so great.’ ”
Eddy’s paramour, Madame Aurore, runs a high-end club catering to wealthy Londoners’ more peculiar vices, leading to long scene in the novel reminiscent of “Eyes Wide Shut.” Her murder leads Veronica and Stoker to uncover a plot to overthrow the British throne that brushes up against Scotland Yard and Veronica’s own complicated ancestry.
Meanwhile London is being terrorized by a series of murders centered around the slum of Whitechapel. And so Jack the Ripper enters “A Murderous Relation,” first when Veronica and Stoker break into Lady Wellington’s desk and discover their friend has been keeping close tabs on the killings and
Eddy’s whereabouts.
The theory that Albert Victor was responsible for the Ripper murders has long since been discredited, but “you really can’t write a book set in London in the fall of 1888 and not deal with Jack the Ripper on some level,” Raybourn says. “That whole autumn London was just a completely different place. It was in the grip of this story.
“It had the same impact on people in London as a terror attack has,” she adds. “It’s all that’s in the news, it’s all people talk about, it has an influence on how people react and how people go about their lives.”
However, focusing her book on the Ripper killings was “the last thing I wanted,” Raybourn says. Instead, she wanted to highlight the victims, to which “A Murderous Relation” is dedicated. One of them helps Veronica and Stoker late in the book, not long before Veronica has a chilling encounter in a Whitechapel alley.
“In every murder you’ve got the two sides of it: the perpetrator and the victim,” Raybourn says. “I was more interested in dealing with the women who are more often forgotten in the equation. And so that was the direction that I went with it.”
Before “A Murderous Relation” is over, Veronica and Stoker’s relationship has reached a significant turning point. Laughing, Raybourn says she would be “such a wealthy, wealthy woman” if she charged for every time readers ask if her protagonists will ultimately end up together. It may take a while for them to find out, though.
“Right now I’m under contract to write through book seven, and I absolutely love writing these characters, so if Penguin will let me keep writing them then I will write them,” she says. “I’ll give you a couple dozen more with no problem.”