Out now: ‘The Wanton Road’, by J.C. Harvey
We’re always ones to highlight red-haired heroines when we find one, and today we have an exclusive treat for you! The Wanton Road is a book not only centred on a ginger heroine, but is written by the same author who gave us Red: A History of the Redhead (AKA the ginger encyclopedia)!
Below is a brief taster of what The Wanton Road and its redheaded protagonist offers, penned by the author, J.C. Harvey, herself:
Imagine yourself in Crossbones’ graveyard, London, on a raw February morning in 1620, and in the company of Bess Holland, of the Holland crime family. Bess has just discovered a foundling, abandoned on a grave:
Bess straightens up, holding the bundle in the crook of one arm, lifts the cloth laid over what she thinks to be its head. Peers down.
Under the cloth, the child is naked. Kicking feet, soft fat arms reaching up. Cord dried up and gone, infant umbilicus a-wink in the round of the belly. No piddler. Little cleft.
‘She’s bonny!’ says Bess. She cups the infant’s head. There’s some few faint curls of hair, slick to the scalp. Darkish. Reddish. Dark amber, polished cherrywood. She holds the baby toward Abi, for her to see. ‘Look at that!’
And there she is – Pris Holland, our redhead heroine.
There’s a lot in The Wanton Road that is ‘real’ history (all its London locations, for a start). When it came to creating Pris, I wanted her to be grounded in real redhead experience too. Pris, I hoped, would be the distillation, in 17th-century form, of everything a redhead today would recognise about themselves.
She has, for example, that redhead temper, fuelled by our ability to produce industrial quantities of adrenalin (‘fires up like a tinderbox,’ as my long-suffering hero, Jack Fiskardo, describes her). And as with many redheads, it makes her brave – when she and he first meet, she is pointing a gun straight at him:
…eyes ablaze, hair coiling about her naked shoulders in tendrils that look dark and red as blood. She is shaking with fury. Gown a-shimmer with it. Or (it may well be) with simple fright.
And her voice. Clotted with rage, nigh-on choked with it, and roaring, in English, as the English do, ‘You hold it RIGHT there! I will take the head off the shoulders of the first man to move!’
Do we know this is the same character we met as an infant? Of course we do, and it’s the flag of her red hair that tells us so. (Needless to say, Pris and Jack’s relationship evolves.)
Something else I wanted to reflect in the book is that redhead sense of identity, the way we learn to live with and live up to our hair. Pris knows she is outside the norm and relishes it. She is supremely (and at one point, almost fatally) confident in herself and her ability to survive. I wanted her to be sexy, because we redhead gals know the only way to deal with the curious fascination we generate is to own it. And because I have always wanted those wild redhead curls (‘like Medusa’s nest of snakes’), I gave her those, too.
The previous books in the ‘Fiskardo’s War’ series have all been about Jack and his doings as a discoverer, a military scout; this time I wanted to go into the boudoir as well as onto the battlefield. And what a wardrobe I gave Pris! Shimmering shot silks of mermaid green; robes of gauzy cinnabar; above all the gown of lustrous yellow satin that Jack buys for her when her own is ruined and in which she seduces him.
Science today has explained so much that to our ancestors was a mystery – like our red hair, for example. Pris might today be described as an empath, for her ability to intuit what is going on inside other people’s heads, but there is more to her than that. That redhead connection with witchery, with a supernatural otherness, is in the book as well. And not to give too much away, but so is the sense of camaraderie we redheads show toward each other – just when, in the book, all seems lost.
I hope I have given you a taste of Pris. And I hope you enjoy encountering her in The Wanton Road as much as I enjoyed putting her there.
The Wanton Road by J.C. Harvey is out now and is available to buy from Amazon.
