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ELEGY FOR EDDIE ~ MAISIE DOBBS #9 ~ by Jacqueline Winspear

When a delegation of costermongers, all clothed in their best, shows up at Maisie Dobb’s office one morning, she is at first bemused. Why are they here? Surely they know that they will each lose money as their appointment cuts into their working hours. Whatever it is must be serious.

And it is, to them.

A “simple” man has recently been killed at a paper factory, crushed by something too heavy falliing on him. The management, naturally, says this was an accident. These men are not so sure. While they may not claim it to be out-and-out murder, nevertheless, something seems wrong.

Jacqueline Winspear, the author of the MAISIE DOBBS series, writes with such empathy about people who are different. Eddie, the simple man, the character of the title of this volume ELEGY FOR EDDY, is the product of a rape between a shadowy assailant, and a 16-year-old girl from the workhouse. Maudie Pettit was so shattered by her experiences growing up in that workhouse, that she works mightily at whatever she is given to do, to ensure that she always has enough to avoid going back there. We learn about Eddie’s birth early on in the novel, and because Maudie would have lost her job if her pregnancy had become known, she has to birth Eddie in secret on a bed of hay surrounded by horses.

It turns out that Eddie, although slow in so many ways, has some outstandiing gifts. He is a genius with horses, always able to calm down even the most high-strung and aggressive. As he is generally good-natured and always willing to help, he acquires a group of fans, who stand up for him when life becomes difficult.

He can do mental arithmetic with great facility, so that even though his Mama insists on his writing down everything he’s earned, actually, he doesn’t need to do that as he can always remember ~ to the nearest farthing ~ exactly how much he has earned. As this is in the days when British coinage was in Pounds, Shillings and Pence, this is quite a feat.

It is not until the end of the novel that we learn about another of Eddie’s outstandiing skills ~ his ability to take in an image and copy it later from memory. And it is this ability that gets Eddie into trouble. For this good-natured man is not going to understand that some images are secret, and there are plenty of powerful people who will try to stop him from copying those images.

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Visiting The Alhambra in Granada Spain

Today was the beginning of two long days of travel. Our coach left at 9 am and took three hours to travel the 188 km (117 miles) west to Granada. Once we arrived in Granada, our local guide arrived and we had to show our passports as well as our tickets for the Alhambra. Unfortunately, in this day and age, people can buy up tickets very fast (within 30 seconds) and sell them on for a tidy profit. And so the Alhambra in Granada and the Mesquite in Cordoba require all visitors to show their passports, so that they can verify who owns the ticket.

After that palaver, we entered the complex. I hadn’t realized that The Alhambra was a village. Nor that there were so many private houses. Or that it had two streets! But we couldn’t have hoped for a better day to explore. It was gorgeous, everything green from the recent rains (it rained during the whole of March), and vibrant with birdsong. We entered first into a suite of rooms that everyone had to pass through in order to visit the Sultan. The throne room was very dark, but apparently was constructed in such a way that a beam of light came in just behind the sultan. This meant that the sultan himself was in shadow, but the faces of the ambassadors standing in front of him were illuminated, giving the sultan quite the advantage.

After that, we went into various different palaces constructed at various different times, and saw the various gardens with their Arab design, which meant that water was the main element. One had a reflecting pool that was the inspiration for the one at the Taj Mahal. Others had small fountains playing in scalloped shell-like bowls. 

But the highlight for me was the Lion’s Court. When I’d visited back in 2015, they were doing major renovations, which meant that it was not possible to walk around and really see it. That convinced me to come back, and I’m so glad I did, because this time I was able to examine the lions, and I discovered that they pushed the water out through their mouths. Our bus driver, Noberto from Portugal, told me that they told the time. For there are twelve lions, and when one is pushing out water, it is 1am/pm. When two are pushing out water, it is 2 am/pm. And so on.

At the end of the tour, some of our group decided to sit out the tour of the Generalife Gardens, but I went along, if only to re-experience their beauty, plus the stunning scenery of the Sierra Nevada that provides a backdrop to the wonderful buildings that make up the Alhambra complex. 

Needless to say, I took masses of photos. What a wonderful day!. 

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THE STABBING IN THE STABLES by Simon Brett

I love the way that author Simon Brett increases the difficulty of the challenge he faces as an author, as he ups the stakes of writing craft during the Fethering series.

In this volume of the Fethering series, THE STABBING IN THE STABLES, it is made vivid to us how amateur sleuths are at the mercy of a lack of evidence, a lack of forensic analysis and a lack of the whole police procedure apparatus that detectives enjoy.

So when Jude finds the dead body of a man in the local stables, who has been stabbed, she has to spend most of the novel wondering what the police think of this mysterious death. 

But that does not make this novel boring. Far from it, for the amateur sleuth pair of Jude (last name infrequently given) and her neurotic side-kick Carole Seddon are resourceful ladies, who manage to eventually figure out what is going on, sans police help.

Jude is a healer, and as the novel goes along she realizes that there is something very wrong with one of her clients Sonia Dalrymple. Sonia is connected to the stable world of West Sussex via her love of horses, but she frequently calls on Jude because she is in so much pain, she can scarcely move. Jude starts to notice a pattern in these problems. Sonia seems much more relaxed when her husband Nicky (an international banker) is away from home on one of his frequent trips abroad. When he is actually present, Sonia’s problems return. In the meantime, Carole strikes up a friendship with the self-absorbed Hilary Potter, whose teenaged daughter Imogen has a passion for horses,

Through such two disparate lines of inquiry, Jude and Carole are able to determine who really stabbed Walter Fleet and who is responsible for the “horse-ripper” mutilations of the mares in the surrouding countryside.

Although Simon Brett is a man, he writes with great sensitivity about women, including domestic violence (Sonia’s husband Nicky regularly beats her up) and divorce. Hilary Potter and her husband Alec are moving inexorably towards divorce, and the whole tension and drama around it are having a really negative effect on their teenaged daughter Imogen. There is no way to really make vivid to someone who has not experienced divorce just how devastating it can be for the child caught in the middle of it. As children have very little agency, they are forced to watch, helpless, as their family breaks apart. It is like having the rug pulled out from under you. It is like watching your house collapse, until it is a rubble of broken bricks and jagged stabs of glass. Nothing seems certain, everything seems chaotic, and the child in the middle often assumes that they must have done something terrible to bring this on.

This is the situation that thirteen-year-old Imogen finds herself in. She is not helped by her self-absorbed mother (whom she hates) or her unreliable father (whom she adores.) Not surprisingly, she is a very angry young lady who cracks under all this emotional pressure. Everything comes to a head near the end of this novel, which author Simon Brett manages to solve in a very satisfactory way. 

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Ronda

Today we went on a walking tour of Ronda, with local guide Marta. By now, the howling wind and pouring rain of yesterday had ceased, and the weather improved. Nevertheless, it was cold enough (48 degrees) for me to wear my puff jacket as we set out at 9:30. Marta first took us to the bullring, left over from the 18th century and talked a lot about bull fighting. Then she took us to the Alameda del Tajo. Alameda means “promenade” in Spanish and Tajo is the name of the river and also means “cut.” 

I walked all the way along the marble promenade to the end, and poked my head over the side. The view was absolutely breathtaking. Apparently the name Ronda means that is is surrounded by mountains and even today, communication between Ronda and other towns is not easy. And one can see why, for there is this enormous plunge down to a boiling river below. Marta told us that we were 300 meters up from the surrounding countryside, or about 1000 feet. 

After taking some wonderful photos showing the morning mist,we walked along the escarpment back into town, over the New Bridge (from 1795) and into the Old Town, where we visited the Cathedral and various palaces (all with lovely gardens boasting beautiful views of the surrounding mountains) and back through a charming square (the Plaza de Maria Auxiliadora) from where the footpath descends to views up of the New Bridge with the waterfall.

We had an hour to rest, and then we had a Tapas lunch at the Parador de Ronda where we are staying. After lunch, I zipped off back across the New Bridge to the Mural of Romanticism, then just past that, left and down to visit the Old Bridge (built in the Renaissance) and the Roman bridge. I must have climbed down one thousand feet to see it. Of course, I thought the Roman Bridge was the Renaissance Bridge, which is still very high up from the boiling stream below. Of course, I was standing on the Roman Bridge which is still open to car traffic.

I didn’t stay long as I had promised to go on a walk that the Odysseys tour guide had organized for us, staring at 4pm. This time we went over the New Bridge as before, but on the other side of the road, turning right opposite the mural, and passing through a charming square before finding the footpath to the right that must have descended another one thousand feet. 

Oh dear, I had to go slow as my knees were now bothering me. But I made it down all the way to the view (which, as promised, was of a steep waterfall falling from under the New Bridge) to find the tour guide waiting for me. I took some time for a breather, and then (of course) I had the task of climbing up yet another 1000 feet. Telling him to go ahead, I went up slowly, as slowly perhaps as I did on that trip to the Pyrennees, where Francois our guide had insisted that we go slowly up the very steep paths. Eventually, I made it to the top and was very pleased to see I was not out of breath. I spent some time taking photos of my charming square before heading back to the hotel, where I spent the rest of the evening resting. 

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THE VIOLINIST OF VENICE by Alyssa Palombo

Although THE VIOLINIST OF VENICE bears an image of a young woman with a low-cut neckline on the cover, it is actually refers to Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), Priest, Virtuoso Violinist, and Composer.

Yes, Adriana d’Amato can play the violin, and that is how the novel opens when the 18-year-old society beauty finds a way of escaping her father’s oppressive mansion to go to Vivaldi’s house one midnight to beg for a violin lesson.

Vivaldi is impressed with the young woman. Although obviously out of practice (she has not had lessons since she was a child) Vivaldi can recognize a true musician when he sees one. This is someone who is not just technically proficient, not someone who can just play all the notes perfectly, but someone who can delve deeper and recreate the expressive power of the music.

And Adriana is impressed with Vivaldi. Although he is 14 years her senior, he creates the most glorious music in his compositions, and he is the violinist par excellence of Venice. Needless to say, it doesn’t take too long for these characters to fall in love and begin a passionate affair.

But we are in Venice in 1710. Young women from families with aspirations and the aristocrats they aped were not allowed to stray. Adriana’s father Enrico d’Amato is a wealthy merchant. He is not an aristocrat, but he has enough money to buy his daughter a marriage to an aristocrat. And so he locks his daughter up in her rooms, preventing her from participating in any society events, or even having any friends. 

But he finds the perfect young man for Adriana in the shape of Tommaso Foscari, scion of an aristocratic Venetian family. Tommaso is about the same age as Adriana, and like her is passionately fond of music. He would have made the perfect husband for her except for the fact that by the time he proposes marriage, she is expecting Vivaldi’s child.

The tension and awfulness of Adriana’s situation ~ pregnant, lonely and entirely in the power of her father who doesn’t hesitate to vent his wrath upon her in a violent rage ~ is given full play by Ms Palombo’s powerful writing. But what I love about this novel is how everything that is so wrong for Adriana at age 18, becomes right twenty years later, when people are able to let the past go and forgive one another.

I see that Alyssa Palombo plays piano and sings, and that might be the reason for the one mistake I could find in this well-researched novel. The keys of C major and A minor are easy to play on the piano. But they are not so easy to play on the violin. Instead, the easiest keys on the violin are those associated with the open strings ~ G major, D major, A major and E major (although E major requires a lot of shifting because it is the top-miost string.) Perhaps this mistake can be corrected in a later edition. 

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Cordoba

Today I woke up to pouring rain and thick mist. So I dressed, and got ready for our day in Cordoba.

We left at around 9 am and drove the 106 km (66 miles) to Cordoba, arriving at around 10:45 am. The bus left us off at the Roman Bridge over the Guadalquivir, which we crossed to meet our tour guide, Lola from Cordoba, just outside the Mesquite (Mosque in Spanish.)

Of course, even on this rainy Thursday, the Mesquite was heaving with tourists, but Lola did at least explain the expansion of the Mosque over time, starting in 786 under Abd al-Rahman I and ending in 1607 with the completion of the Christian Church.

When I visited it before in 2015, I resented the imposition of a Catholic Church in the middle of this marvelous mosque. For the mosque has a horizontal structure, conveying equality and respect amongst the people. While the Church is tall and vertical, imposing a hierarchy on everyone, meaniing that most are at the bottom of the pile. Apparently, we can blame the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500-1558) who was also Charles I of Spain. The bishop who was trying to build a church in the mosque was threatened with death. So he appealed to Charles, who told him to go ahead. But Charles was Holy Roman Emperor, which meant that he had to spend a great deal of time in Germany and the Low Countries. By the time he arrived in Cordoba, he saw that a grave mistake had been made, and remarked that he would not have allowed the Cordoba Mosque to be partially destroyed in order to build a church.

But sometimes bad things turn into good things. At one time there were 300 mosques in Cordoba. All of them are now gone, except for the Mesquite. Why? Because the Christians used the building every day to come and worship, and so the mosque was protected from destruction. 

Lola told us about those famous horseshoe shaped columns of the Mosque, telling us they were made out of brick and limestone. Because limestone was softer than brick, the whole structure provided some flexibiliy. By contrast, the church was built entirely of white marble. When the 1755 earthquake hit, the church acquired cracks. But the mosque, which was 800 years older, survived with no damage whatsoever. 

After that, we went to the Jewish Quarter to see the famous bust and statue of Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher. Lola pointed out that he was dressed as a Muslim, because he lived amongst those people. After that, we dispersed for lunch and I had a delicious red tuna tartare in creamy galic soup that was delicious!

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THE FOUNDLING by Georgette Heyer

THE FOUNDLING by Georgette Heyer is one of her wonderful Georgian Regency novels. Set in 1818, when George III had gone mad, Queen Charlotte was seriously ill, and the Prince Regent ruled England before becoming George IV, it has alll of the liveliness, nonsense and wonderful characters that you’d expect from this talented writer.

Needless to say, a young man has got into a scrape. Matt, the cousin of the Duke of Sale, is being sued for breach of contract after a series of impassioned letters that he wrote to a young miss have been picked up by an unscrupulous con artist, who reckons he can get £5,000 for the blackmail. The claim is that Matt dumped this young woman, and that therefore he can be sued.

Of course Matt does not have £5,000. But his cousin, the vastly rich Duke of Sale does, and so the frolic begins when Sale, a very young Duke (only 24 years old) decides to help Matt.

Along the way, we meet the object of Matt’s affections, the stunningly beautiful Belinda, the foundling of this tale. As a foundling, Belinda does not have parents or even a last name. She has been brought up in a orphanage so she can read and write and sew. But she is one of those people with champagne tastes and a beer budget.

I found Belinda to be an extremely interesting character for I had never met anyone like her before. She is like a moth that dances before a flame (usually the attentions of a young man) before darting off in some other direction. Belinda is not the brightest spark in the matchbox. She is hopeless at giving directions, remembering names, or even giving a coherent account of her life. And so, when the Duke of Sale puts her under his protection, he is led a merry dance trying to find a suitable husband for her. 

Eventually, everything works out in a satsifactory manner. But what adventures the young duke of Sale has!. And what an eccentric entourage he attracts, including not only the beautiful Belinda, but Thomas Mamble, a teenage runaway, and Swithin Liversedge, the con artist who is trying to make a packet out of Matt’s indiscretion.

Ms. Heyer has quite the ear for dialect and this adds greatly to the texture of the prose. If you have never read Georgette Heyer before, you might want to start with this novel.

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A Day in Seville, Spain

Today, the weather changed, with pouring rain and wind.

The day started out well enough. True, the clouds looked ominous, but there was plenty of blue sky. It took us only 35 minutes to get from our Parador at Carmona (which happened to be Peter I of Castile’s castle) to Seville, where the coach stopped on the waterfront of the Guadalquivir river. Turns out Seville was an important port city during the Middle Ages. Even though it is located 65 miles from the Atlantic, it is navigable all the way up to Seville and beyond. Also, Magellan and Chrisopher Columbus set off on their trips to the New World from Seville. 

Lidia was the name of our tour guide and she hopped on the bus when we stopped momentarily at the river. Then she took us on a bus tour of old town Seville, saying it was the most efficient way as the walls that surround old town are 6 miles long. We went past all the buildings built for the 1929 Iberia-American Expo, before getting off the bus in the Santa Cruz area of the city. 

Santa Cruz is the part with all the tourist attractions as The Alcazar and the Cathedral are located here. After a brief walk around (not very pleasant as the place was heaving with tourists as if it were August), we finally entered the Alcazar. Because parts of Season 5 of Game of Thrones was filmed here, they now require you to have a time ticket plus your passport so they can check you in. I recognized it from my previous visit, but it was wonderful to have Lidia fill in all the details. Apparently, the Alcazar is the Royal Palace and has been so since the time of Peter I of Castile. This is the same Peter who built the Parador at Carmona where we are staying.

The gardens of the Alcazar were lovely, and I would have stayed but they were swarming with tourists. So at the end of the tour, I headed out to find lunch, finally settling on the Taverna Belmonte. Others of our group arrived while we were eating. As I was starving (I’d had no breakfast) I ordered gazpacho followed by fried cuttlefish along with a glass of red wine. The gazpacho was pink pureed soup served in a wine glass, completely unlike the gazpacho I make in the United States, where everything is chopped up. However, it was delicious. I was a little dubious about ordering fried fish, but as they had no grilled fish and I didn’t want the inevitable meat dish, I sighed and ordered it. 

I was pleasantly surprised. It was only lightly fried, meaning it was possible to taste the fish. After that, I ordered a cappuccino, but of course they didn’t have the machine to make it so I had to content myself with a cafe con leche (coffee with milk) instead. I also ordered chocolate cake, which came with a glaze of caramel and two spoons of light cream. Delicous!

After all that, I rose to my feet and went for a long walk, determined to get away from all the tourists. I found my way down to the river front, to the Torre del Oro (Tower of Gold) which is where both Magellan and Christopher Columbus left on their voyages. Nearby, sitting in the water was a replica of one of the five ships Magellan took with him on his voyage of circumnavigation, along with around 250 men. They returned without Magellan (who died in the Phillippines) with only one ship (the replica on the Guadalquivir today) and 18 men.

By this time, the wind was picking up, and there was nowhere for me to sit and rest my sore feet, so I made my way back to the Alcazar, planning to visit the cathedral. Of course I stood in the wrong line for tickets – it was for those who had purchased tickets online. Of course, it was starting to pour again, so  I had to run around the cathedral with my umbrella half-open as flimsly protection, until I was able to get inside and purchase the €14 ticket. Expensive, but well worth avoiding the downpour that followed. 

I sat down in the first seat I could find, then got up and wandered around. The cathedral is enormous and overdone, but there is something splendid in all that gold leaf. At 3:40 I rose to my feet and made my way to the Tourist Information Center near the Alcazar for the 4pm meeting.We were going back to the Parador and my sore feet really needed it!

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Travel day from Évora Portugal to Carmona Spain

Today, I rose at 6 am as the suitcases had to be at the door by 7 am. At 8:30 am, we departed for Carmona in Spain, but I persuaded our tour guide to let me walk down early as I have motion sickness problems and needed to snag a seat near the front. My plan is to have the second seat on the right-hand side as that gives me a wonderful view out of the window for driving on the right, a tolerably decent view out of the front, and doesn’t annoy my tour-mates as I am not sitting in either of the front seats. 

We set off for Mérida, part of the provice of Badajoz, and the capital of Extremadura. At our first stop at a petrol station, I managed to convice some people to make me a ham and cheese sandwich on croissant, and sell me two bottles of white wine (medium and small.) My method of communication was to type what I wanted to say into google, and add the phrase “in Spanish” and then read it back to them. It worked!

Mérida’s main claim to fame is the amphitheatre (that hosted the gladiators, animal hunts and executions), and the theatre, which hosted the plays. Of the two, the theatre was much more impressive as it had the orignal Roman colums there, plus four original statues. The young man who was our local tour guide was so much better than the tour guide who’d taken us around Evora, that I realized how boring she’d been. He took us through the sites with energy and enthusiasm, so much so that I was able to stand still to listen to him. 

After that, it was lunch time. He advised us to have lunch first, then go and walk to the Roman Bridge (thirty minutes each way), and then go to the Archealogical Museum (free) and use the toilets there. 

I found a rather touristy place for lunch, where the people didn’t speak English. Nevertheless, I ordered an Ensalada Avocado and red wine (vino tinto), which proved to be much tastier than its Portuguese cousin. After that, I set out on my errands. Because the toilets at the pit stop hadn’t had soap or water in them, I went around the corner to a pharmacy to buy hand wipes. Again, the people didn’t speak English, but using my Google method (which I prepared while standing in line) I was able to get the man to understand what I wanted.

Next, I decided I needed dessert. I spent most of my free time finding a bakery, which sold various items. Most of these seeemed to be extremely carby and sweet. So I opted for Opera Cake, which I split into two when I got to the Parador at Carmona. 

Our Tour Guide gave us until 3pm to enjoy Mérida. Unfortunately, a couple of people (the couple sharing the front seat in front of me) were missing. Even more unfortunately, they’d left their iPhone on the floor under their seat, so that when the tour guide called them, the phone rang under the seat. (Not helpful!) Eventually, he found them and we set off at 3:30 pm, thirty minutes late.

We made another pit stop, where I spent my time ordering coffee. I wanted a hot chocolate, but when I said “chocolate calde” they either didn’t understand, or said they didn’t have it. So I ordered a cafe con leche instead, as I was told that everyone did that in Spain. Because I wanted to go to sleep tonight, I had only 5 sips, before leaving it. Then I went to find a snack, as I hadn’t had anything other than lunch, and found a small Twix, which I devoured. 

Eventually, we arrived at our Parador, built on the site of the medieval castle of Peter of Castile. Needless to say it commands a fine view over the gentle countryside. The only fly in the ointment was when I discovered I could not get my old-fashioned key out of the door. Silly me! I had to turn it so that it was horizontal, not vertical, before it eased out of the lock.

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CARVING SHADOWS INTO GOLD by Brigid Kemmerer

CARVING SHADOWS INTO GOLD is a transition novel. By that, I mean that it is not a standalone novel. Which means that if you read it without reading the FORGING SILVER INTO STARS, the first novel of the series, you are really going to have a hard time understanding what on earth is going on.

Matters are not helped by the fact that author Brigid Kemmerer literally throws you into the deep end. It took me several chapters to figure out that the events before me took place only a week after the ending of FORGING SILVER INTO STARS. When the Royal Family of Syl Shallow was attacked. When three-year-old Silla (sp?) nearly witnessed her own mother being murdered before her. When Nora, Callyn’s younger sister, would have died of a knife wound had not Callyn’s magic saved her.

And that is really what this novel is about, this whole issue of magic. Some people see its many benefits. For example, the people of liberal Emberfall (Canada?) are mostly comfotable with its uses. But in next door Syl Shallow (USA?), which is much more conservative, magic is regarded with a great deal of suspicion. 

This kind of divisiveness is all-too-common in today’s political climate, And I really love the way in which Ms. Kemmerer deals with it. You only have to replace Magic, with some hot-button issue to see how relevent this novel is. It really sounds like she is talking about the differing attitudes in the USA and Canada to vaccines, or abortions, or any of a number of fraught issues. One of the tragic consequences in CARVING SHADOWS INTO GOLD of this intolerance to magic, is that the Queen’s family is not altogether welcome in Syl Shallow. This causes a great deal of loneliness, not only for King Gray, but for his wife Lia Mara.

Of course the novel builds to a resounding climax, which leaves a bitter aftermath of difficult choices and sacrifice. Matters are not satisfactorily resolved, there are too many unanswered questions for that. And so it is obvious that there will be at least one more novel in this series.

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