New Release

The Cab Girl of Aldgate

Two fares in one night. One bled on her cushions. The other paid her four shillings to forget where she set him down.

Buy on Amazon All books

By Alice Blackwood — Victorian Romance

The Library

All Novels

The Cab Girl of Aldgate

Two fares in one night. One bled on her cushions. The other paid her four shillings to forget where she set him down. London, November 1894. Elsie Coppin drives her father's hansom cab through Aldgate after dark, and she has no right to. The licence hangs on a nail in the back room, and it has Abel Coppin's name on it. Abel Coppin hasn't stood without a stick since a brewer's dray went over his leg in the Minories. Somebody has to find the rent. Somebody has to feed the mare. So Elsie takes the box at night, when a face under a lamp is only a shape, and she tells nobody. Then comes a wet Tuesday in November. A man gets into her cab without giving a street, talks too fast the whole way to Whitechapel, and is gone before she can see him properly. He leaves blood on her seat cushion and one good glove on the floor. Half an hour later a gentleman crosses the road to her, reads the number painted on her cab, and only then opens the door. At his own front step he presses four shillings into her hand and asks her to forget the journey. She takes the money. She keeps the glove. She writes nothing in the fare book. There is no body in the papers. No name, no inquest, and no end to it. But there is a cabman on her father's rank who has begun watching her one beat too long. There is an inspector from the Public Carriage Office who would have that licence off its nail by morning. And there is a young man in a good coat working his way round the ranks of the East End. He is offering half a sovereign and no questions at all to anyone who can find him a lost glove. Elsie has it under a floorboard in Mansell Street. She can hand it over and be paid. She can burn it and be safe. What she cannot do is stop wondering why a gentleman stood in the rain and read the number of her cab before he ever touched the door. And she cannot ask one question about that night without admitting she was the one driving it.

Buy on Amazon

The Candle Girl of Shadwell

Every night, Ada Finch sets a candle in her window. She has never told a living soul why. A hard woman in a hard trade, Ada dips tallow by the riverside, keeps her door bolted and her heart bolted tighter. Then, on a bitter night in the week before Christmas, a cry comes out of the dark — a newborn left on her frozen step, wrapped in worn wool, with a silver christening spoon tucked against him that no dockside child has any business owning. Keeping him is madness. Giving him up is worse. Because someone wants this baby gone, and they have money, the law, and the whole machinery of Christmas 'charity' on their side. To save him, Ada must trust the last man she should — a cold young gentleman in mourning who came to her stall asking after a lost child, and who knows far more than he says. One candle-maker. One hidden child. One Christmas to prove a truth that powerful men have gone to a great deal of trouble to bury. Some doors you don't shut, whatever it costs you.

Buy on Amazon

The Rat-Catching Girl of Stepney

London, 1878. The rat-catcher's daughter goes where no one else will: inside the walls. And the walls are full of secrets. Jenny Tapp has crawled through the dark behind Stepney's finest sculleries since she was eight years old. Her father's chest is failing, and the family trade now rests on her quick hands and her terrier, Biddy. Then, behind a wainscot on Stepney Green, she finds a pearl and garnet ring. Next comes a gold watch, then a twist of sovereigns. Beside each one, someone has cut three neat scratches into the skirting. Rats don't gnaw like that. Somebody is using the walls of the good houses as a hiding place. Jenny means to find out who, even if it costs her father his best customers. Her father's new hired man doesn't make it easier. Adam Ridley is steady, patient, and far too interested in those same scratches. He is hiding something. And he keeps turning up exactly where she needs him. The trail winds from a kindly pawnbroker's back door to the most respectable servants' registry on the Commercial Road. A boy has gone missing, a fortune in stolen jewels is waiting in the dark, and someone wants the rat-catcher's girl silenced for good. To clear her name and save the people she loves, Jenny must trust the one man she suspected from the start, and go deeper into the walls than she has ever gone before.

Buy on Amazon

The Lavender Girl of Rotherhithe

Nobody murdered him. He was buried alive. And somebody opened the coffin, looked at him, and put the lid back. Rotherhithe, 1877. Nell Sallis washes and dresses the dead for one and sixpence a body. She has done it since she was fourteen and she is better at it than anybody in the parish, which is how she comes to open a nine-week-old coffin in the January cold and find what nobody was ever meant to find. Fingernails torn off backwards. Splinters of elm driven up under them from beneath. Bruises of the kind that only form on a living body. And a man laid out straight and decent, with his hands crossed on his chest exactly the way she would have crossed them herself. Clement Chessum was certified dead by a physician of forty-one years' standing, coffined by a respectable firm and buried in front of a clergyman. He was also alive when the earth went over him. Somebody came back for him in the dark, and so the question is not who killed him. The question is who found him alive. And why they chose to put the lid back down. Nell has a shred of black glove leather, four iron screws where there should have been brass, and a button she should never have picked up. She has a father with eleven months in prison behind him and a name this parish has not forgotten. She has an apprentice doctor who believes her and can prove nothing at all. And she has until the last week of March, when the railway company clears the ground, the old coffin goes on a fire, and the only evidence in England burns with it. A Victorian mystery about the dignity of unseen work, the cost of being right, and what a woman with no standing can do when the truth belongs to her alone.

Buy on Amazon

The Sugar Girl of Bermondsey

Some truths the world would rather not hear. She was born knowing how to make them listen. Bermondsey, 1873. The air hangs thick with the reek of boiling sugar, and Martha Rye has given the refinery the whole of her young life. She cannot read a printed page. But she can read a column of figures faster than any clerk, a doubtful plank quicker than any foreman, and the truth of a person's face plainest of all. In a world built to talk over girls like her, that is a dangerous gift. When a wrong is done that the powerful would rather call misfortune, Martha is the only soul who refuses to sit down and let it lie. A sugar girl's word is worth nothing against a master's, and the few who might listen are the very men her mother warned her, with her last breath, never to trust. Least of all Stephen Harcourt. He is a gentleman, a doctor, everything she has been taught to fear. He is also the first man ever to look at Martha Rye and hear a person worth believing. What grows between them is quiet, and forbidden, and forged under threat. And it will ask of them both far more than either can afford to lose. A sweeping, atmospheric Victorian romance about grit, class, and the fierce hope of finally being heard. For readers who love a heroine who will not stay silent, and a love that has to be fought for every step of the way.

Buy on Amazon

The River Girl of Limehouse

The river takes what it wants. Eliza Barrett means to take something back. Eliza is thirteen, raised on a coal lighter on the Thames, with mud on her boots and her mother's good sense in her hands. The river is the only world she knows, and her family is all of it. Then, one ordinary evening, her mother steps off the lighter to settle a small matter of business, and never comes home. The river police ask their questions and leave unhurried. The wharf grieves and moves on. But Eliza knows her mother did not simply walk into the dark, and she will not let the water close over her as it closes over everything else. What she uncovers runs deeper than one missing woman: a quiet, respectable trade in secrets, and a man who has gone to a great deal of trouble to make certain people are never found. The search will take years. It will cost her more than she can count. And Thomas, the boy who has stood beside her since they were children, is becoming the one person she cannot bear to lose. A mother gone. A city that looks away. And a girl from the river who was never going to stop looking.

Buy on Amazon

The Silk Girl of Shoreditch

Shoreditch, 1880. Annie Tull winds silk in a failing loft, raised there from infancy by the old weaver who took her in and never once said from where. When he dies, he leaves her the one thing he had kept hidden under the floorboards all her life. It is a christening gown of fine lace, the kind made for the child of a great house, and stitched into the hem is a name that has never been her own. The name belongs to a family on the far side of the city, and to a daughter they buried twenty years ago. Some people have taken great care that the grave was never disturbed. They will take a good deal more to keep it so. Annie has been nobody her whole life. She does not mean to stay nobody now. A novel of silk and secrets, set in the working heart of Victorian London.

Buy on Amazon

The Wash-House Girl of Camden

A bloodied shirt. A secret worth killing for. And a washerwoman nobody thought worth fearing. Camden, 1865. Florence Webb has spent her whole life being looked through — a laundress who survives by noticing nothing and staying invisible. Then a gentleman's shirt comes down in the wash from one of London's great houses, stiff with another man's blood. She is meant to scrub it clean and forget. They chose her because she is poor, and frightened, and beneath their notice. They chose wrong. As Florence pulls at one loose thread, her livelihood crumbles and the law turns against her — and her only ally is the last man she should trust: a son of the very house she means to bring down. A slow-burn Victorian romance wrapped inside a mystery.

Buy on Amazon

Free Download

The Lighterman's Wife

A prequel to The River Girl of Limehouse

A clever woman. A dangerous truth. And a river that hides what it chooses to keep.

Hannah Croft can add a column of figures faster than any man in the counting-house, and it has never earned her a farthing. In the cold, respectable heart of Victorian London, a woman with a head for the truth is worth nothing at all — until the winter everything she has is taken from her.

With her old life shut like a door behind her, Hannah goes east, down to the coal wharves and tar-black barges of Limehouse, to be no one. Among the lightermen and the tide she means to keep her head down, her figures true, and her past sewn well out of sight.

But the river has its own honesty, and its own hard bargains. There is a quiet lighterman who asks her nothing and sees her clearly. There is a shadow out of the life she fled that has not finished with her. And there is the one thing Hannah carries that she cannot bring herself to destroy — a truth that could cost her everything she has left, and the only thing worth the keeping.

Claim your free read

A standalone prequel — perfect for readers who love a capable heroine, a steadfast hero, and richly drawn working-class London.

About

Hi, I'm Alice.

I write Victorian romance novels from a small house in Yorkshire.

I'm drawn to stories about people who don't quite fit where life has put them — governesses, second sons, widows with opinions — and what happens when they decide to want something more.

When I'm not writing, I'm usually reading, walking the dog, or drinking too much tea.

— Alice

Newsletter

Join the mailing list

What I'm working on, release dates, and the occasional first look at a chapter. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.