Edith Holler

by Edward Carey

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The witty and entrancing story of a young woman trapped in a ramshackle English playhouse—and the mysterious figure who threatens the theater's very survival

The year is 1901. England’s beloved queen has died, and her aging son has finally taken the throne. In the eastern city of Norwich, bright and inquisitive young Edith Holler spends her days among the boisterous denizens of the Holler Theatre, warned by her domineering father that the playhouse will literally tumble down if she should ever leave its confines. Fascinated by tales of the city she knows only from afar, she decides to write a play of her own: a stage adaptation of the legend of Mawther Meg, a monstrous figure said to have used the blood of countless children to make the local delicacy known as Beetle Spread. But when her father suddenly announces his engagement to a peculiar, imposing woman named Margaret Unthank, heir to the actual Beetle Spread fortune, Edith scrambles to protect her father, the theatre, and her play—the one thing that’s truly hers—from the newcomer’s sinister designs.

Teeming with unforgettable characters, Edith Holler is a surprisingly modern fable of one young woman’s struggle to escape her family’s control—and to reveal inconvenient truths about the way children are used.

Release date: October 31, 2023

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

Road, and there is our neighbor the Assembly House and a little beyond that the church of St. Stephen, and that is the whole box around the theatre. I was born here and have not been anywhere else since, not even once.

The city of Norwich is visible to me from the theatre roof. The cathedral spire I can see, for example, and the castle on its high mound. Under the mound there is supposed to be a king called Gurgunt. Some say he founded the city, and that he waits in the deep with a whole army ready to rescue Norwich should it come to great peril. It is just a tale certainly, but a wonder tale nevertheless—it makes you feel that magic is local. Finally, I can see the back of the Bethel Hospital, founded in 1725 for curable lunatics.

I see all these buildings because they are tall and large and declare themselves well. But I have never once stepped inside any of them. I don’t go out at all, but stay in perpetual. For a better understanding of my life, you may buy a miniature Holler Theatre in card form, from Jarrold & Sons, the stationer, 1–11 London Street, which can be assembled at home. It is a beautiful toy and with it you may mount your own in-house performances; Price 6d. But I live in the actual building.

 

There is a sign outside the theatre, the real theatre, that stays there day and night. No matter what play we are playing, still this sign stays the same; even when the theatre is dark, it remains. The sign says THE HOLLER THEATRE, HOME OF THE CHILD WHO MAY NEVER LEAVE. Just next to the sign is a large plate glass window, and through the window can be seen a little room where the child who may never leave sits and is observed.

 

It is in this room that I have often performed my one-person dumb shows for the people of Norwich. I get into costume and act out all the parts. The people of Norwich come and watch me, and on a good day I may raise a crowd of fifty or more. Here have I been the mangy ghost dog of Norfolk mythology, Black Shuck, who roams the desolate coastline and the graveyards filled with Norfolk dead; indeed, the sight of the hound is a warning of imminent death. As Shuck, I growl and howl (without making a sound) at the people. Or else I am Boudicca, queen of the Iceni tribe, holding in my hand the head of a Roman soldier (got from the props room); or else, more quietly yet, I am Julian of Norwich, who was a woman who lived not ten minutes’ walk from here, long ago, back in the fourteenth century, and was an anchorite, voluntarily walled up inside the church of St. Julian, on St. Julian’s Alley in the district of Richmond on the Hill. She was the first woman to write a book in English, the very first. (We are both writers, Julian and I. I always keep a notebook and pencil about me.) She had visions, she did, and I act them out for Norwich, Norfolk.

Figures for a card theatre.

I have visions, too, of a kind, when I let my imagination go as wild as Black Shuck. I have stories and tales for every day of the week. But most of all I am the discoverer of terrible secrets, I am Norwich’s detective, and I have uncovered something dark and wicked—which I shall come to by and by, and for which afterward I may be blessed or cursed.

When I am done with my performance I draw the curtains, so that Norwich may know I am no longer available, and that the spectacle is done with—and then it may seem to them that I have died, or that perhaps I was never truly there. Sometimes, fairly often, when I am not at my post, a doll of me, the hard face made by the theatre’s puppet mistress, Mrs. Stead, the cloth body by the wardrobe mistress, Aunt Nora, sits there in my place. (When the doll of me needs to be replaced, if I have outgrown it or it has been accidentally damaged, its material is always taken apart and used elsewhere—nothing does go to waste in this theatre and all must be useful.) (On occasions I pretend to be the doll.) (And sometimes the doll and I sit together and we are twins. I make the doll move more than me, just to confuse.) (It must seem to Norwich that I don’t really exist at all, that I am only a person-sized puppet or doll. And perhaps I am, I think that sometimes. Father says it’s good they are not certain, it is an excellent device.)

I am Edith Holler. I am twelve years old. I am famous.

The year is 1901. The month is March, by which you’ll understand that the Christmas decorations have long been put away and that the pantomime season is quite ended. And what is most nationally pertinent is that the old queen is fresh dead. And the new king, Edward, looks like he has only a little life left himself.

---

•   •   •

My confinement is for my own safety. I cannot go out, for to go out would kill me.

I have been ill much of my childhood, laid often in my sickbed. They thought I should not last. It was diphtheria and it was meningitis and it was pneumonia; one woe, as they say, did follow on another’s heals. I was ill at my birth, and my own dear mother did die then—and so death is never far away. I should have died, I lay lost to the world in my bedroom, and they fussed over me. I have always been frail, Father is terrified for my life, and so I must keep indoors, and so I do.

And, which is even more: not only do my illnesses keep me inside, but there is also in addition a nasty curse from an unhappy old actress, which was given to me at my christening. But, though I do not travel, yet there is much to wonder over from my confinement, both within and without. From the walls of the Bethel Hospital, I do hear the dismayed inhabitants often enough. The hospital is just across Theatre Street, and from time to time I watch as the inmates in their courtyard act out their own strange one-man shows. Sometimes some of our actors suffer from a persistent confusion and they have need of the Bethel Hospital. I have known actresses to go across the road, as we call it, and never come back again. Never once.

Though naturally I cannot go out to school, from the roof I can see two gloomy factories of learning. Crooks Place Boarding School, very close to the theatre, is where some two hundred boys are educated and live and, like me, don’t get out much. I have watched the boys in their uniform when they come to their exercise yard, have seen them fight one another and play with conkers on a string. After that, I had Mrs. Cudden, one of the seamstresses, bring me in some conkers, and for a little while everything was conkers with me. I felt I was closer to the boys of Crooks Place then, and I found clothes like theirs in the wardrobe and went about for a while as a young fellow and I insisted they called me Bartholomew. But the distant boys never returned my waves—perhaps after all I was too far away; I did spy them only with my old opera glasses—and at last I said stuff them and their dull education. Not for me the conker, after all. It is not natural to me.

Another neighboring property is the Assembly House. This was built as a place of entertainment and dancing, but in 1876 they took away all the entertainment and dancing—said no to the people falling in love, no to the married couples come for music, no to laughter and to cake, no to gaiety and to passion. Instead, they filled the beautiful place with learning and tore out all the light. They threw away all the young males and said, Don’t you dare come again, no, you must never. Instead they have there only girls. The girls go in, all uniformed, of a morning, to be taught how to come out proper Norwich ladies. They never wave back at me in their dull lines but look only downward, for I, they seem to say, am not an upright specimen. They think me like Peter the Wild Boy, a famous feral person who came from a woodland outside of the town of Hamelin, in Germany, and once lived in our city. But I cry for the occupants of the Norwich School for Girls. That wasn’t the point of that building, I have called to them from our roof. No, no, you have ruined it with your learning, with all the strict women come to suffocate love inside. You have killed the Assembly House, now it is merely another manufacturing shop and the soot that comes from the chimneys is all Latin and deportment.

I take a different school.

For a long time Mr. Lent, one of the old actors, was my teacher. He would make me speak the proper English and not slide into the Broad Norfolk that we have hereabouts. It never did for the daughter of my father, the great actor, to have a child that blurted ollust for always or squit for nonsense or muckwash for sweat. Shakespeare must not be spoken with a Norfolk accent.

But I never speak onstage, I protested.

Even so, said Mr. Lent, it hurts the ears and we’ll have none of it. Mr. Lent is gone now, but his lessons have not died with him. And since his passing I have greater study.

In my bedroom do I consider the history of Norwich. For, though twelve, I wonder if I am perhaps also ancient. In my bedroom, where I sit, I have about me all my toys, but also maps of Norwich throughout the ages. For Father had said to me, one day as I lay abed: You must not go out, but Norwich may come in. Ever after, I have made Norwich my great subject. Norwich is outside the dark interior of the theatre, and so to me Norwich represents life and space, and so as I ailed I had the idea that Norwich itself might save me. I demanded proof of Norwich, proof of it in all its different centuries. I clung to the city as I clung to life. I was given all manner of books and papers upon Norwich, Norfolk, for its study was all that would comfort me, and the more I studied the better I felt.

Norwich was my medicine. Norwich is my life. I think, though twelve, I must know Norwich better than anyone.

Backdrop for a card theatre.

At first, I got all my information regarding Norwich from the stacks of shelves of the Norfolk and Norwich Subscription Library, which is on Guildhall Street. Norwich is the first city in Britain to have a public library. I eat it all up and remember much of it and it sustains me. Medieval Norwich, I may tell you, for example, had fifty-seven churches, which is very many. One of my uncles or aunts would fetch the books for me, but it was not long before I had read all the library had to tell me, and then I began to get sicker again, and my father in his desperation knew not what to do. It was Mrs. Stead, the puppet mistress, who understood the remedy and proclaimed it simply, “Yet more Norwich.” And she, being an ancient and sensible and practical woman, was able to encourage the librarians on my behalf and new material was found. So I came by the Assize Rolls and the Assembly Rolls, the Quarter Sessions books, the Mayor’s Court books. Mrs. Stead set out in the morning with her empty basket, walked the short journey to Guildhall Street, and would return with new volumes. She would plump my pillows and sit me up in bed and say to me, “What have we here? Ah, I see Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich. And what else? Here then the Book of Pleas. And here we have the Norwich Census of the poor. There, Edith, that should keep you quiet for a while.”

Those brave and clever librarians who, finding this need of mine an interest and a challenge, sought out their colleagues around the city, and so came papers from the Guildhall library, from the Cathedral library, from the library at City Hall. And thus I read on, my pale, long fingers upon Norwich, and I came to learn so much. I saw volumes from the poorhouse, from the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, I read bastardy records, settlement certificates and removal notices, and many a load of old newspapers and worn-out bill stickers. It was a pleasure for them in the library, I think, to seek out these obscure pages and have them delivered, ever by Mrs. Stead, to a child that they had never met but had merely seen through a plate glass window—made, incidentally, on Wensum Street by the Norwich Glass Company.

As I read on—for I had time where others did not, and I spent patience upon so much communication that had been left lonely for many years—I began at first to have suspicions, and then to grow a terrible certainty, that something abominable was hiding in the pages of Norwich’s history. In the annals of the Surveyors, in the pages of reports from the Overseers of the Poor, in the statements of the Vestry and Parochial Church Council, I would find, almost always in single lines, disturbing reports: Child of Thomas Pelling wanting, Lakenham, last seen Fybridge; ward of Norwich, Carrow, missing at evensong; Mary White, child, & Richard Loftus, child, Colegate, not seen these past 100 days. A terrible secret began to grow in me, and the discovery of it sent me back into my sickbed and seemed to call me unto death. Indeed, I thought the secret would kill me, until at last I understood that it was the secret that was keeping me alive—and that I must tell it, I must spill my secret of Norwich upon the streets of Norwich, for I knew Norwich, though I have never gone out into it, better than Norwich knew herself.

Norwich steals life. Norwich murders.

Norwich has lost lives in so many ways over centuries, through fire and flood, through cruelty and negligence. Yes, yes, you will say, no doubt: but this is true of many a place. And you would surely be right. But here in this city of mine I have discovered something else, something unexplainable, something terrible that has been going on for centuries, that I rush to set it down: So many children have gone missing, there are lost children everywhere. From all corners of Norwich, from Conesford and Wymer, from Mancroft and Over the Water. Nor were they ever found. Not a one.

Norwich, I must own, is famous for missing children. In 1144 a tanner’s apprentice named William disappeared and they blamed the Norwich Jewry, housed between Haymarket and Oxford Street, saying they had murdered the boy for their rituals. And afterward many Jews were murdered in retaliation. It is the first record of medieval blood libel to be found in all of Europe, here in our Norwich city. Now they acknowledge it wasn’t the Jews after all, but who then did murder young William, whose poor stabbed body was found in Thorpe Wood? No one can say, and though this murder did certainly happen before all the other children went missing, yet it seems to me a kind of precursor or warning.

Where do they go to, these missing children of Norwich? A single child missing will command the attention of an entire city, especially if that child is from a prosperous family: then everyone will look everywhere in suspicion, then the city will hold that missing face secure in its imagination. But what if there were a hundred and more missing, and all at a time—a hundred a year, say—then missing children will be a commonplace thing, and so seeing the bill posters with lists of the missing will become ordinary, and ordinary means invisible. It has gone on for centuries, I have found it out: Children go missing in Norwich at a terrible number. Some five hundred over the years from Pockthorpe alone. True, sometimes in quiet seasons, maybe only four or five are lost, but this quietness is generally followed by a deluge of fifty or more suddenly absented.

Ah, you will say, let us call this missing of yours instead Small Pox and all is mended. Perhaps—but where then are the bodies? Why are their names in no death registers? Are these poorchildren? you will ask then. And I must say yes, mostly, but not always. Can you prove it, that these children were lost? you will ask. And so then I can show you the years—and centuries—of notices of children lost. It is a very incautious city, you will say. Yes, yes, but I will say: Who takes the children and where do they go? And then you will say—for you have had a moment to consider, and you do not wish to descend with me into dark knowledge, lest it threaten the very foundations of history and governance—No, no, it is all too much, I cannot believe it. And in response I will say, You choose not to believe, because it is too terrible a thing, and so you ignore it—and thus it goes on.

You will be in a bad mood with me by then, and irritated that a child, a girl, could so arraign you, and you will not acknowledge your ignorance, you will decide to refuse it. You will say to me, What a horrible child you are. Why cause this dark trouble? You have imagined it all. And have I?

Sometimes I doubt myself, and yet again and again I see in the ancient ledgers: child lost, children missing, boy twelve absent, girl seven unaccounted for, twins nine misplaced. What happened, I ask you, to Lolly Bowes? How did the life of George Kellet end? Who saw Nathaniel Bradshaw at his last, or Millie Bolton or Alfred Waltham? And for those lost children I do call out. How many children have you lost, O Norwich? Where, where is Polly Stimpson? Whatever happened to Martha Higg? Simon Pottergate? I begin to suspect that only people who keep very still may catch the truth that is there before us, for everyone else is too busy. Only I, in illness, with my time and study, in the gaslight in my bedroom, with books as my playfellows—only I might hear such truth in the small hours of the day, like the little tapping of a deathwatch beetle that can only be heard when all else is silent. It is a terrible thing, this knowledge of Norwich. I sit beside my secret day and night—a whole legion of lost children shut out in darkness—and it has made me ill. And I cannot unlearn it.

It was last summer when I came into my horrible knowledge, when I concluded at last that there was no doubting it anymore. Then I called out the names, that they might be heard again: Good morning, someone might say to me, and in response I would reply, Molly Cruickshank! In the afternoon, at teatime, I would wonder aloud, Edwin Bagshot? And when they tucked me in at night I would challenge them to know Samuel Carter, never seen again.

In response to so many names, my aunts and uncles made me sit out on the roof, looking at Norwich. There I stretched out my hands and wondered over my terrible discovery, I shivered over it, it made me vomit. Yet I own I did feel a little better being on the roof, up there standing beside the statue up at that height at the tip of the building’s façade. The statue is a Greek-looking lady and some say that she is Euterpe (the muse of lyric poetry) and others that she is Melpomene (the muse of tragedy) and some have wondered if she is Boudicca because she is holding a spear, yet that spear I think was actually only a support that once held a mask or a harp which the poor stone lady has long since dropped. Most people though forget she’s there at all, and fail to notice her atop the building. I lean beside the stained statue and look out at Norwich and am calmed, for there is so much to see there, and from my view I saw no children being forcibly lost. So I pretended, when I could, that all might be well. Look there, after all: At a right angle to the Bethel Hospital are the Chapelfield Gardens, which I can peer into and thus see a little nature and people walking about, and in the summer sometimes I can spy, upon the park benches, small scenes of love—for love may be found in my Norwich too. In the park I can see the Chapelfield Pagoda, a great iron pavilion. It looks Japanese but it was made by one of the sons of Norwich, or at least from nearby Wymondham, a man called Jeckyll did it. The pagoda is famous here, like me. But poor Mr. Jeckyll went mad and he was taken to the Bethel Hospital, across the street from both the theatre and the park. They never cured him, he died there under lock and key. I wonder if, like me, he looked out from a high window into Chapelfield Gardens at his rusting construction, and if that was a blessing or a sadness.

I wonder who will believe the truth of my terrible secret, or will they one day, as they did with Mr. Jeckyll, take me to the place that says it cures, though it doesn’t always. And then, if I am cured, will I cease to believe my secret? Will the cure let my hair thicken, make my long face rounder, my skin pinker? Will the cure let me travel? And I wonder, would I care to be cured? Could I trust in it?

I do think I’d like to step out, if I could. ...