The Penny Heart
Martine Bailey provides a traditional culinary recipe before each chapter. One caution, though: the ‘most effectual Hystericon for Women’ needs careful preparation, as too enthusiastic a dosage of henbane brings ‘convulsions and fatal sleep’.
Fortunately, there is more than enough interest in The Penny Heart to keep the reader from such experiments. It is 1792, and Grace Moore, a timid, artistically-talented spinster with a drunken and violent father, sees marriage as her only way out, although she thinks herself too unattractive. However, the small fortune inherited from her grandmother attracts the Croxon family – needy, ambitious and unscrupulous – and they launch their attack using their handsome son, Michael. Soon father Moore is pensioned off, and the nuptials are rushed forward. But on the wedding night, Michael is absent from his wife’s bed and for many nights thereafter.
Woven into this is the tale of Mary Jebb, pickpocket and swindler. Sentenced to death for substituting a forged pound note for a real one, she is reprieved and transported to Australia. She escapes, arrives back in England, changes her name, and hires herself out as a cook. Grace Croxon is delighted to take on the obliging ‘Peg Blissett’, who comes with glowing testimonials. By turns affectionate and duplicitous, loyal and murderous, Peg and Grace face love and betrayal – and cooking – together.
The Penny Heart is a good read. The heroine may seem a ninny, gullibly falling in with her husband’s base intentions, but considering the vulnerability of women of that day, and the problem in legally escaping from an unwise marriage, one feels for her in her struggles.
