This blogpost was originally published at Dru’s book reviews on January 17, 2020. (https://drusbookmusing.com/2020/01/17/annabel-rowe/)
Beginning when I was six and Edwin was nine, years before Edwin became an opium addict and an art forger, he taught me how to paint, with patience and humor, despite my father’s protestations that it was a waste of his time. Edwin and I both knew I didn’t have his genius with the brush, but he said that I had something just as valuable—a knack for perceiving people’s secret longings and fears. I suppose he was right. I’d spent my childhood observing the suspicion on my father’s face and the resentment on my mother’s, results of the small daily cruelties they exchanged. But while there had been teasing, there had never been cruelty between Edwin and myself. And Edwin never made me feel stupid, the way I sometimes do at the Slade, even now.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the Slade School, on Gower Street, here in London. Four years ago, in 1871, Mr. Felix Slade declared he would open a school where men and women could study art together. Plenty of men railed against the radical idea—not, they insisted, because they objected to ladies studying art; they were enlightened beings, after all. But what was to be done about the anatomy drawing lessons? It was an insoluble problem. In response, Mr. Slade coolly ordered, “Drape the loins,” and four women were admitted to the first class. I entered two years later, and although I have worked studiously six days each week, the resentment my presence causes has barely waned. More than once a man’s foot has caught a leg of my easel as he passed by. I’ve found my canvases slashed and my brushes mysteriously misplaced. Despite this, after two years, I have won some approval from Mr. Poynter for my ability to capture what he calls “the small, telling scene.”
When Edwin was 24, he was tried for forgery. The charges were partially trumped up by a man who wanted to conceal his own role in the profitable scheme, but there was enough truth to convict. Edwin served a year in prison, and when he came out, four months ago, he seemed subdued and reflective, if at times quite low in his mind. He insisted to me that he’d reformed, and he wanted to rebuild our friendship, to earn my trust.
This is the part that is hard for me to relate. You may think me ungenerous but I didn’t leap like a fish to his hook. Too well I recalled the times before my parents died when he’d come home, shamefaced and shaking in the aftermath of opium use. Mama would nurse him back to health, and as Edwin kissed us goodbye, I’d pray that the next time we saw him, he’d be well. But he rarely was. My father eventually spurned him, though my mother never wavered in her devotion. Being not much more than a child, I clung to hope, for all I wanted was for him to be my friend and champion again. And now? I’m older and I know better. He can no more be what he once was than become a winged horse. But now, with each passing week, when Edwin and I meet, and he arrives on time, with clear eyes and steady hands, I trust him a bit more—enough to make the effort, today, to go to his flat to find out why I haven’t heard from him in two weeks. Besides, he is my only family, and I will admit that I want desperately to believe there is someone tied to me by blood whom I can trust.
My work finished for the day, I retrieved my umbrella from the stand and ventured out in the rain. At the terraced house where he rented rooms, I climbed the stairs to the top floor, and saw the door open. That was odd, I thought. Odder still was the sight of two strange men riffling through Edwin’s paintings and papers. I burst out, “What are you doing? Where’s Edwin?” They turned, and I saw the truncheon that one of them carried.
Plainclothes detectives?
The younger man said gently, “I’m so very sorry.” And the look on his face shattered my world like stained glass into shards.
Through reading, I learned to appreciate art objects, but what captivated me were the stories around them—the daring heists, the deceptive forgeries, the vicious family feuds, the anonymous sales by European nobility who sought to mend their fortunes discreetly, the desperate attempts to preserve art during WWII, the lawless pillaging of antiquities from Egypt, and so on. On my 29th birthday, in 1994, I was in “the room where it happens”—Christie’s main salon—when Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Hammer, the notebook with the famous Vitruvian man, was auctioned off in a fierce, frantic bidding war for $28 million to an anonymous phone bidder, who turned out to be Bill Gates. It was the first time I felt down to my bones, and in the adrenaline running down my arms, the suspense, allure, and history that surround pieces of art. 
As I began to research, however, I came upon a few encouraging stories of women artists who made their living by their craft. One was Kate Greenaway (1846-1901), for whom the annual and prestigious Greenaway Medal for British book illustration is named. Another was Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919; born Mary Evelyn Pickering), whose stunning paintings I had seen in the Met in New York. As a child, Mary was immensely talented in both writing and painting—but her upper-class mother “wanted a daughter, not a painter,” and paid Mary’s art tutor to demean her efforts and discourage her. Like the story of Charles Dickens’s older sister Fanny, a brilliant pianist who had to leave the Royal Academy of Music because she couldn’t afford tuition (which hardship fueled my second novel, A Dangerous Duet), this anecdote spoke to me of all the painful consequences of the constraints on ambitious, talented women in the 1800s.
This summer, I am drafting another mystery, again set in 1870s London. Henry Morton Stanley (of “Dr. Livingston, I presume” fame) has just returned from his first expedition to Africa, which he would later describe My heroine Gwendolyn Manning has a friend Lewis Ainsley, a (fictional) journalist, who returns with Stanley and plans to write a book exposing the brutality of the ivory and slave trades. But there are influential men who would squelch that story, and when Lewis is murdered, Gwendolyn must find out why—especially after Lewis’s wife points the police toward her. The words are landing on the page, messily, but they’re landing, and this afternoon I’m off to hike and find some more.