I’m out of Leon Garfields. But this month I did read two novels by an author he recommended highly, Ioana McGregor. She wrote six novels, four of them were set in the eighteenth-century, the two I found were not. One is a historical children’s novel set in the 1500s, and the other a Victorian whodunnit for adults written when she no longer kept her Lesbianism in the closet.
The Poppinjay is one of several children’s historical novels written by Iona McGregor while she worked as a teacher. it’s set in St Andrews during an invasion of the castle by protestants, following the murder of the unpopular Archbishop - the chaplain to these invaders being John Knox.
David Lindsay is the popinjay of the title. Born in Bordeux to a Scottish wine merchant and a French woman, he has travelled to St Andrews to get a job under the Archbishop. He’s daydreaming of a life of visiting fine courts, reading delightful books and seeing fine art and architecture. He’s dressed to the nines and very snobby about the outfits of everybody he meets. Unfortunately, his prospective employer is killed the day of the interview and he is in the castle grounds when it is invaded.
He sneaks out, but not without being injured and is taken in by an old woman and her grand-daughter, who barely make a living from fishing and odd-jobs. As he heals, he helps out, shedding his fine clothing and finding some satisfaction in doing work well. After Father Anthony leaves some medical texts with him, he begins to interested in medicine.
The town is in an uproar, the forces from the Regent (as Mary, Queen of Scots is four years old at this point) are both late and ineffective. Their attempt to mine the castle is pointless and, worst of all, lets people from the castle out - and they have the plague.
The people are suspicious of the old grandmother, who did curse the castle with pestilence, and David and friends are saved by a friend of theirs dying of plague in their outhouse, so now no one will come near.
Will they survive the plague, the siege, the anger of the mob?
The Poppinjay is a decent, if slight children’s adventure. David starts as shallow and uncaring, and grows to be a better person through his experiences. The girl who saves him is good fun and she has a pet monkey. The book is full of the fun little Scottishisms that were also in The Edinburgh ReeI. It’s a glimpse into a time and place I know very little of, the Scottish Reformation, and balanced the depiction of both protestants and catholics very carefully. Ultimately, it’s a decent workaday story, without the more interesting post-Culloden implications of The Edinburgh Reel.
Death Wore a Diadem is interesting because it’s the book Ioana McGregor wrote after quitting her job as a teacher, deciding to no-longer write children’s books and embrace her lesbian activism more openly. It’s billed as a ‘maverick historical whodunnit which satirises the snobbishness of genteel society.’ The blurb talks about how the main character, Christabel, ‘enlists the help of her lesbian lover and combs the foggy streets of the capital in search of a brutal killer’.
Set in 1860, it sounds like a fun proto-Sarah Walters type of lesbian, crime fun. The blurb is misleading, however. The book is far more interested in satirising ‘the snobbishness of genteel society’ than it is being a knockabout crime romp. Christabel and her lesbian lover do very little detecting and it’s discovered pretty early on that the death is not the result of a brutal killer as much as a clumsy thief. The chief antagonism in the book isn’t the forces of law verses those against it, it’s Christabel the school student against the headmistress who wishes to cover things up.
It took me a while to realise what the book actually was, as I found the first half to be a very interesting look at the dynamics of a revolutionary school for girls in Edinburgh. At the head is Margaret Napier, who has detailed lists of all the transgressions of staff and pupil alike. She’s hoping to channel the visit of Empress Eugénie of France into a huge PR coup for the school and to cement herself at the top of it. She rules firmly, pressing her will on all the teachers, ready to bring up minor indiscretions. Her second in command, Miss Erroll, is a firm protestant and gets ill at the thought of the Empress’s visit. Her biggest headache is Christabel, who is defiant and has contracted a friendship with one of the teach assistants that might not be seen as wholesome. The school is leant a paste replica of a diadem, this goes missing.. later on one of the undermaids is found dead with one of the paste jewels in her bag. This seems cut and dry to Miss Napier, but Christabel won’t have the maid, Peggy, blamed for stealing the diadem.
I assumed all these school dynamics were set up for us to solve the mystery, which they sort of were, but while I thought they were the base for thrills later, the dynamics were the book. The mystery is very supplemental to the politicking within the school. What’s more, the sizzling lesbian romance never gets more raunchy than ‘one thing led to another’.
Had the blurb been more explicit that this was a book about the society of a boarding school, with the theft and death of the maid as incidents within that, I’d have found it more enjoyable. There are many characters and they are all well delineated, with interesting relationships and powerplays, but I kept waiting for the book to get all lesbian girl detective, and it never really did.
If anything, it seems Iona McGregor was working through her gripes with being a teacher, enjoying creating the monstrous headteacher in all her petty glory, the flighty and pretentious teachers, the vapid schoolgirls. If this was her big, freeing novel (she turned to writing study-guides after this) the demon she wanted to exorcise was not having to write for children, or of concealing her lesbianism, it was how annoying working in a school can be.
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