Queen of Diamonds - Queen of Thieves: Volume Number 3
By Beezy Marsh
William Morrow Paperbacks; paperback, 304 pages; $17.99; available today, Tuesday, January 14th
Beezy Marsh, an Oxfordshire, London, native, is an international #1 and Sunday Times top-ten bestselling author who believes that ordinary lives can be extraordinary. She also has been an award-winning journalist who has spent more than twenty years writing for newspapers including The Daily Mail and The Sunday Times.
Queen of Diamonds is the final installment of Marsh's crime trilogy about a real-life London gang. This fast-paced, gritty story of love, loss, and loyalty to the gang focuses on crime queen Alice Diamond's bold beginnings in 1920s Soho.
Set in 1922 London, Alice, an orphan, dreams of more than racking up long hours in Pink's jam factory. She draws inspiration from stories about the legendary Queen of Thieves, Mary Carr, who brought terror to the streets of Victorian London.
Alice sets out to form her own gang, the Forty Thieves. Sly seamstress Kate Felix from Whitechapel becomes Alice's accomplice after convincing her they would make the perfect team. It doesn't take them long to make headlines in the glitzy world that is Soho at that time, as they become known for their daring heists and the row of diamonds that Alice uses like brass knuckles in her numerous brawls.
Also rather quickly, Alice realizes that a life of crime makes her powerful enemies, including some who are closer to home than she and Kate would like.
Alice must sacrifice more than she ever imagined, but, as the subtitle on the book's cover says, the toughest and most beautiful diamonds emerge when under pressure.
In this excerpt, from the Prologue, Marsh sets the story by writing of London's Ragamuffins by Lady Dorothy Harcourt in London, 1900: "They beg and dance for pennies outside West End theaters, selling bunches of wilted lavender in the summer, or hot chestnuts in the colder months, in their hand-me-down clothes so tattered and torn.
But who are they, these mysterious creatures, who emerge from dark, winding alleyways and slip into the shadows when mischief is afoot? Where do they come from?
My first attempt to find out more took me to the Seven Dials in Covent Garden, accompanied by my butler, who followed me at a safe distance. I had listened intently to gossip at Mayfair dinner parties denouncing the area as a hell's kitchen, a den of thieves, but I must confess, despite the obvious dangers, my interest was piqued.
Late one afternoon, I entered the warren of ordure-filled narrow lanes bordered by squalid tenements, in search of my subjects, rather like an intrepid explorer setting off into the jungle. Having been told to fear the inhabitants of the Dials: the thief, the boorish laborer, the wily secondhand salesman, the brawling brats and the loud, ill-dressed fallen women, my heartbeat quickened. But what I found was a way of life so honest in its poverty-stricken state that it was quite touching.
Yes, people are poor, but haven't we had enough of paintings of pitiful mites with sad, sunken eyes or half-starved mothers, clasping tiny scraps of humanity to their withered bosoms? I saw beauty among the detritus, like flowers blossoming in a fertile soil, which had yet to be tilled by decent society. I knew then I had to capture it all on canvas. My husband, Lord Wilberforce Harcourt, whose work you will almost certainly know from his exhibitions at the Royal Academy, has been kind enough to indulge my little hobby and provided me with the paints, easel, pencils, and paper needed to carry out my research.
What I wondered, as a perused the bustling street scene unfolding before me, of the other side of life? Of happy poverty! The roister-doister boys careering down the lane on their homemade carts, the girls skipping happily through the streets in torn pinafores and the merry mothers bouncing ruddy-cheeked babies on ample hips as they gossip together. I spied some women snatching a few moments to attend to their piecework, peering through the cracked windowpanes of their tenement sulleries as their little ones ran amok. The children were not wretched or miserable. They were enjoying playing in the mud! That is the London I believe people want to see. And so, dear reader, that is why I set about creating my first compilation, which I share with you now in this book, very modestly, for I am no great artist.
But, I humbly venture, I believe I have captured something of the spirit of the London of our day, the other side of life, that of the ordinary folk. And I would entreat you to entertain my folly a little longer, as I share the secrets of how I, a mere baronet's daughter, captured them at work and play, my ragamuffins.
Firstly, you must watch, study them in their natural habitat. Keeping your footman or Butler at a discreet but reassuring distance can provide the necessary feeling of security you may need to take that first step into a neighborhood more familiar to those below stairs. Over time, they will come to accept your presence. And a good supply of ha'pennies in your pocket can go a long way to securing that first, crucial contact with the underclass!
A favorite spot of mine is near the fountain in Endell Street, a mere stone's throw from the workhouse. I have spent many hours observing from there: young children playing in the dirt or struggling to reach the cooling waters of the fountain to quench their thirst, mothers weighed down with baskets from the slum laundry, husbands frittering their wages on penny bets on street corners and young girls, with faces so fresh and full of hope that they are almost exquisite in their rags. I defy you not to feel captivated by them, as I was."
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