Character Showcase - Mrs. Amarinda Siddaway

“Ladybird, ladybird fly away home.

Your house is on fire, your children are gone.

All except one, and that’s little Anne, for she has crept under the warming pan.”

With those words, Amarinda Siddaway became a legend. She had just run out of the fog with a bloody knife in her hand, and as she fell at the feet of the man who would become the most important witness at her trial, this is—according to his testimony-- all she had to say for herself.  Yet she claimed to have no memory of it.

That was how the case began, but, as Doctor Evander Fielding knows, there is no beginning and no ending to most things in life. There is simply transformation from one point, one existence, to another. So he knows that a woman with a bloody knife in her hand is not a beginning. It is simply the continuation of a story and he is a small player in it. Frequently he wishes she had run out of that fog and found somebody else’s feet to fall at. His life could have been so much calmer and easier had she not happened upon him that morning and thus brought him into her story. But she did and now he is trapped there, haunted by the case of Mrs. Siddaway and her murdered lover.

All he’d wanted was some fresh air that morning. He hadn’t been feeling himself at all and had an important interview that day. The last thing he’d wanted, or expected, was to find himself drawn into a murder trial and then into a strange obsession with an accused murderess – one of those “strumpets” his mother always warned against. But he could not help himself.

There was something about Mrs. SIddaway that would never release him from her enigmatic memory.

*

Ten years before the reader enters the story in A LOVELINESS OF LADYBIRDS, Mrs. Amarinda Siddaway was accused of murdering her much younger lover -- a promising artist named Hywel Ellis -- in the grounds of ‘The Brindle Horse’ hotel. It is a scandal the local people have never forgotten and the hotel has never quite been able to live down. Part of the mystery’s allure can be owed to the fact that the victim’s body was never found and Mrs. Siddaway was shockingly acquitted by a jury at the trial, despite the fact that the newspapers and people who read them had already decided on her guilt. Ten years later, the heated debate about her verdict still bubbles out, occasionally, at dinner tables around the country. Her notoriety is now equal to those of scarlet women throughout the centuries; her tale a cautionary one for husbands and unhappy wives from Tadcaster to Timbuctoo and beyond.

According to her photograph printed in the newspaper, Mrs. Siddaway was a great beauty, a woman of willfulness and daring, who was also, apparently, cunning enough to fool the jury. If she truly was guilty, of course. But can there be any doubt? She was discovered holding the bloody weapon; her lover nowhere to be found. As the Magistrate at the trial is recorded as saying,

“A woman who abandons her husband, her marriage, her responsibilities and her self-respect, to frolic shamelessly about the country in illicit company with a man a dozen years her junior is clearly not of sound mind or judgment. She will answer for her crimes, and gentlemen can rest easier in their beds knowing that such behavior will not go unpunished.”

And yet she was acquitted, in a turn of events that shocked society and left the mystery of her lover’s disappearance to go unsolved.

Until now.

A decade later, a very similar event is about to occur at the same hotel, causing folk to wonder whatever happened, not only to her “victim”, but to Mrs. Amarinda Siddaway too.

Has she returned to strike again?

The ladybirds gather on a sunny windowsill. They seem to know what’s coming. But then, they always know everything.

When Doctor Fielding finds a ladybird scuttling along the rim of his washbasin one morning, he knows she’s back again.

This time the killer just might finish what they started.

*

Meet the seductive Mrs. SIddaway, if you dare, in A LOVELINESS OF LADYBIRDS, coming July 5^th and available for PRE-ORDER now.

(Image here: L'ebauche by Emilie Friant 1885)