When Grace’s parents are institutionalized, she’s sent to live with her uncle’s family, where she’s looked at with suspicion. The family considers her an inconvenience at best: they think she’s strange and destined to go “mad,” like her parents. She mostly tries to stay out of the way. It doesn’t help that she has face blindness. It’s hard to make friends when you don’t recognize them. Her only confidants are her cousin Charles and the stablehand. Charles is a sympathetic ear, and the stablehand is her connection to the outside world: he provides her with paints, in exchange for items to sell.
Hanging above Grace’s bed is an ugly painting of a woman with open sores lamenting in a muddy field, a dead pheasant beside her. It commemorates a family legend about an ancestor who, in revenge for her husband’s cruelty, cursed the family. For generations, the family has refrained from eating pheasant, to keep the curse at bay, but Grace’s aunt and uncle decide to dispose of the superstition, eating a pheasant dinner and burning the ugly painting.
Unbeknownst to the rest of the family, Grace is a skilled forger. She can’t paint from memory, but she can duplicate any painting. And she practiced this skill by replicating the painting above her bed. When the original is removed, she feels like the room is missing something, so she hangs her copy up in its place. To the family, though, it appears that the painting has miraculously returned. And not long after, the male family members begin to sicken and die, just like the curse promised. Charles is lost at sea, presumably dead.
Many years later, Charles reappears, ready to claim his right as the last male heir. The problem is, no one can agree if he’s really Charles or an imposter. As the story unfolds, we see Grace try to puzzle out whether this is her cousin. At the same time, she is desperate to find a way to survive as a lesbian in 1899 that doesn’t involve marrying a man. She’s hopeful that her forgeries can offer her financial stability, but it comes with a lot of risks.
I was so engrossed by this historical novel with a gothic twist. While this isn’t a fast-paced plot, there’s a growing sense of dread, and it kept me guessing the entire time what the truth was about Charles. The motif of copies versus originals works very well, and I love the writing style: “When we fall in love with a person, we fall in love with the copy of them, inexpertly done, that we carry around with us whenever they aren’t there.”
I also found the depiction of queerness in 1899 England very interesting. Despite being secluded, Grace meets several other queer women. In multiple instances, they just look at each other and know. When they ask, “Are you like me?” there’s no ambiguity to what that means.
There’s also a thread throughout about money: if Charles is an imposter, then Grace’s father—and once he dies, Grace herself—becomes the heir to the fortune. Grace is conflicted about money: she desperately wants the independence it offers, but she also observes how her family’s wealth is not fairly earned and how many people could better use that money. When she creates forgeries, she debates the ethics of it, even as she feels this is her only skill.
I was enraptured by this story, and unravelling of the mystery is perfectly paced. This was also a much more queer book than I was expecting. If you are a fan of queer historical fiction, I highly recommend this, and I can’t wait to read more from this author.
