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More about Cover the Mirrors
L-R: Sitters at a séance table; art doll of Molly by Shelle of thedollings.com (click to enlarge); the Victorian 'medium' Florence Cook and her 'spirit guide' Katie King (a resemblance, maybe?)
Cover the Mirrors began as a plan for a short story about a Victorian 'medium', but my ideas for the story soon expanded beyond the couple of thousand words of a short, and so the novel was born. A small, red-headed young woman named Molly had been popping into my head, and eventually plot and protagonist were joined.
What I find so quaintly charming about Victorian Spiritualism is the rather nonsensical portrayal of the spirits of the deceased as being essentially similar to those of the living, except for their invisibility or occasional ability to materialise as ectoplasm and the like. Spirit 'materialisations' took human-like forms (either using a person dressed up, or a human-like doll of some sort), complete with the classic gauzy veils, reminiscent of shrouds or winding sheets. Stalwart elements of the 19th Century séance - table-turning, ouija boards, bells ringing, ghostly hands touching the sitters, showers of fruit and flowers...all seem rather peculiar coming from someone who no longer has a physical body, and this is what inspired William's remarks, when Molly and he meet at the Meadowcrofts' dinner party, about the difficulties of touching someone when one has passed on.
You may notice that in the acknowledgements of the book, I thank my unofficial mentor Kim Wilkins for her support. Well, this is probably as good a time as any to mention that Cover the Mirrors also includes a hidden tribute to her. If any of you are fans of Kim's fantabulous dark fantasy/timeslip novels and are wondering where exactly the tribute is, I'll give you a couple of clues: look again at Kim's novel Grimoire (an excellent read if you want to hear about some 'real' Victorian ghosts), and think about parallels between Holly and Christian and Molly and Eddie (the girls' names rhyming, by the way, is not it, but I've come over all coy, so I'm not giving a detailed explanation of the truth on here).
So, after all my research into Molly's profession, do I think I could stage a believable séance? Of course not. I'm a dreadful performer, for one thing, so I sincerely doubt that I could brass-neck my way through the necessary routines, and I'm sure that there are plenty of tricks I never even heard of when I was doing my reading that would make all the difference when swaying an audience. The nuts and bolts of any illusions were as carefully guarded then as they are now (understandably, from the point of view of the performers), and so it's not the easiest thing to find sufficient information to actually attempt such things yourself, rather than have a pretend person do them. For instance, while I could have quite easily had Molly fool her sitters into believing she was levitating (by using the lights-out-and-knocking-shoes-against-their-arms technique sniffed at by Florrie), I haven't the first clue how she'd cause a table to levitate in a well-lit room, which some people certainly seem able to do. That doesn't mean I believe such acts are examples of paranormal powers, though.
Then there's the question that often comes up tangentially to the subject of this book - do I believe in ghosts, and/or the ability of certain people to communicate with them? Well, this could be an essay in itself, so I'll simplify and say that I've never had any experiences or seen any evidence to convince me of the truth of either. OK, I don't know what, if anything, lies beyond the grave - none of us do - but I'm happy to consider any evidence that stands up to scrutiny. (Unfortunately, the emotionally charged nature of the subject means that there is little evidence that passes the hurdle of desperately wanting something to be true.) I'm certainly no expert on the subject (from either side of the debate), and so I'm remaining sceptical pending further information. And anyway, what does it matter what I think? I'm a storyteller; I don't debate for a living.
The 19th Century spawned a wave of 'celebrity' Spiritualists, from Florence Cook to the Fox sisters and Daniel Dunglas Home. Incidentally, Molly's Aunt Florrie was named in tribute to Florence Cook, who is pictured above with her 'guide' Katie King, whose name I also gutted for parts and donated to Cover the Mirrors' Katy (the maid-of-all-work) and Molly's friend Jenny King. D.D. Home (known, among other things, for his levitating skills) seems to have attracted a number of female admirers, among them Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who upon hearing of his betrothal, wrote to her sister: "Certainly her taste must be extraordinary. Think of the conjugal furniture floating about the room at night." Well, Elizabeth had obviously given the matter some thought, anyway!
The other common question relates to the tattoo I had done to commemorate the release of the book. Yes, I have the 19th Century séance image at the top of this page tattooed across my upper back. (You can see a photo of it in my blog, but it's not a very good one, and doesn't really do the artist's work justice.) Obviously I wanted something that was relevant to the book, but I also have a bit of a history with that specific image. When I was first researching Cover the Mirrors, I found a copy of that picture online, printed it out and taped it into my notebook. When I got my publishing deal, my Mum made me a congratulations card with the same picture on the front (she didn't know I'd previously used the picture myself; she just searched for images and picked that one independently.) Then when the design team at Macmillan were coming up with a jacket for the first edition hardback, they used the same image again in the lower left corner (once again, independent choice). So you can probably see why I've become rather attached to that particular piece of artwork, and I'm thrilled with the reproduction on my own skin, which was done by Emma Kierzek of Aurora Tattoo in Lancaster. To answer the most popular questions about the tattoo itself, it took six hours (two sessions: one of four hours and the other two), and yes it does sting a bit, but it's probably nowhere near as bad as you might think. (If anything, the muscular stiffness that came from hunching over for hours on end to 'stretch the canvas' of my back was worse than the pain in my skin!)
If you've read the book and would like to see the guide I penned for book groups and the like, you can visit this password-protected page.
It includes a little about the inspiration behind the book, and a few questions for consideration and/or discussion, but I thought I'd lock the page to prevent
anyone accidentally clicking on it and exposing themselves to plot spoilers when they didn't mean to. (And because I'm a bit sneaky, of course.) The password should be pretty easy to guess if you've read the book, though.