Character Showcase -- Miss Fanny Boole

 In A DEADLY SHADE OF NIGHT, Fanny Boole arrives at a house called Furthermore, on the edge of Whitherward Fell, to live as housekeeper and caretaker for a bedridden old woman. She hopes this will be her fresh start – a new beginning in this “out of the way” place, where nobody knows her, or anything about the mistakes of her past.

But Fanny has no idea what she’s let herself in for.

Before she arrived there, she thought that “Furthermore” sounded like a fairytale place where princesses slept. Alas, it’s not long before Fanny begins to realize that there’s something very wrong about the house and everything that happens there.

Although she is hired as the only servant in the house, it’s not the workload that troubles her, but the eerie, weeping walls and the howling winds at night. Not to mention the unearthly screams of the ancient mistress of the house, as she dreams of the past and imagines a green-eyed monster trying to get at her.

“Mother,” the old lady shouts into the dark, “What have you done?”

There’s more too. The man who hired her to tend his grandmother, did so without informing the old lady, who still thinks that the new housekeeper is “Polly”, the previous maid – a young woman who vanished suddenly one day and hasn’t been seen or heard from since.

And Old Pip, the gardener who never comes indoors, stands out in all weathers, singing "Polly put the kettle on". It's the only thing he does say. He doesn't talk to Fanny at all.

There are days when she'd just like to leave, but curiosity holds her back, because there are clues she's begun to find around the house and she thinks they might have something to do with the previous maid's disappearance.

A scrap of blood-stained linen caught on a doorframe; a long hair with a tiny piece of scalp attached, trapped in some cracked glass; a broken piece of laudanum bottle, and a sinister mark on the wallpaper.

Then there is that foul odor, which seems to grow stronger when she stands at the bottom of the stairs… 

The blowflies-- ever present in the house -- are humming now, inside her head. She doesn’t know how much longer she’ll be able to stand it. Will the house drive her out, as it must have done to Polly, the previous maid? Or will she find a way to stand up for herself and fight back against the creeping evil that now comes for her too?

Fanny may be spinster in her forties; described as plain, shy, awkward and unsophisticated, but she’s a butcher’s daughter with a strong stomach, and a few dark secrets of her own. She might not know any big words or complicated mathematical sums, or anything much about the world beyond Yorkshire, but she knows when a storm is brewing and it's time to bring the washing in. She knows good from bad.

As her father liked to say, “Our girl she can wring a bird’s neck and have it plucked and stuffed before you’ve got your coat on. Something to remember, eh? She’s a butcher’s daughter, so think on! Mind you don’t get on her bad side.”

But Fanny might find herself in deadly danger, unless she gets away from that house before its too late. Before whatever it is that waits in the cupboard under the stairs breaks free.

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You can find out more about Fanny and her fate in A DEADLY SHADE OF NIGHT (A Bespoke novel iii) COMING SOON

(Image: The Maidservant by William Arthur Breakspeare 1855-1914 )