Local Customs
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Nominated for the 2016 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award Nominated for the 2014 Victoria Book Prize An Englishwoman’s mysterious death in 19th-century West Africa haunts those left behind. Letitia Landon, «Letty» to her friends, is an intelligent, witty, successful writer, much sought after for dinner parties and soirées in the London of the 1830s. But, still single at thirty-six, she fears ending up as a wizened crone in a dilapidated country cottage, a cat her only companion. Just as she is beginning to believe she will never marry, she meets George Maclean, home on leave from his position as the governor of Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast of West Africa. George and Letty marry quietly and set sail for Cape Coast. Eight weeks later she is dead – not from malaria or dysentery or any of the multitude of dangers in her new home, but by her own hand. Or so it would seem. Local Customs examines, in poetic detail, a way of life that has faded into history. It was a time when religious and cultural assimilation in the British colonies gave rise to a new, strange social order. Letty speaks from beyond the grave to let the reader see the world through her eyes and explore the mystery of her death. Was she disturbed enough to kill herself, or was someone – or something – else involved?
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Advance Praise for Local Customs:
“Thomas is at the top of her game with this elegantly written, deeply felt gem of a novel.”
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We went back up to London after three days and stayed with friends until we left for the ship. Our marriage had been found out, probably through Bulwer, who could never keep a secret, and I did get some of the attention and presents a bride is entitled to. I hardly saw George; he didn’t even take time off for Queen Victoria’s Coronation procession, but I watched it with great interest, surrounded by friends. We were looking down from a second-storey balcony, to avoid the throngs that lined the streets, so of course we couldn’t see her face as the carriage passed, but I couldn’t help but wonder what her life would be like, every moment of her day regulated according to tradition. Every movement observed; every utterance noted. I didn’t envy her, our first reigning queen since Queen Anne. What is that old proverb? “A favourite has few friends.” In my own, much smaller way, I had discovered how true this was. Detractors, scandal mongers — they buzzed around me like wasps. Indeed, there was a nasty scandal sheet called exactly that, The Wasp.
Would Victoria succeed or fail? She was very young, eighteen, nineteen? And would need good advisers. Even so, how many of those courtiers who bowed to her and fawned over her today, would secretly wish her ill? How well Shakespeare understood all that: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown!”
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