Sylvia Marks is a minor character in Inheritance of Shadows. She’s a doctor, who was part of the Scottish Women’s Hospital at Royaumont, France, during the First World War. Down entirely to the encouragement of my lovely editor Lourenza Adlem, she is now about to have her own trilogy set in the little English village of Bradfield in the early 1920s.
I don’t have a title for any of the books yet, but I’m sure something will spring to mind before too long!
You can read about other inhabitants of Bradfield if you are a subscriber to my newsletter, in An Irregular Arrangement, a 10,500 word free story.
Read on to find out a bit about Sylvia and her friend Lucy.
Excerpt
“Sylvia! Are you coming?” Lucy called up the stairs.
“Nearly ready, just a moment,” Sylvia’s voice was muffled. “My hair isn’t behaving.”
Lucy trotted up the stairs to her bedroom. They were going to be late for the beginning of the film at this rate.
“Let me help,” she said.
Sylvia sat in front of her mirror, mouth full of hairpins and arms cocked up behind her head, shoving them into her coiled hair.
“It’s got to look half-way neat if I’m going to take my hat off,” she said.
“You can keep your hat on,” Lucy said.
“It always seems rude to the people sat behind me,” Sylvia said. “The seats aren’t very well laid out.”
“Hang on, then,” Lucy said.
She stood behind Sylvia and wrested her hands away from her head. “Give me the brush,” she said.
Sylvia’s hair fell in a curtain to below her waist and was thick and wavy. It was brown, a delightful range of shades from light to dark. Some of the women at Royaumont had cut their hair—bathing facilities had been rudimentary—but Sylvia had kept hers long, wound up in a chignon every day.
She handed the brush from the dressing table back to Lucy and Lucy began to run it through from crown to ends. It didn’t really need much brushing, Sylvia had already done that, but she used the brush to gather in all up into one hand, a heavy tail of soft raw silk in her palm. The faint scent of rosemary that she had always associated with Sylvia was from her hair, Lucy realised.
Sylvia removed the hairpins from her mouth and watched Lucy in the mirror. Her eyes were soft. “No-one’s brushed my hair for years,” she said quietly.
“It’s beautiful,” Lucy said.
She began to wind it into a rope around her hand, twisting it up onto Sylvia’s head as she went. She pinned as she twisted, making a flattish coil that would sit easily under Sylvia’s beret. She focused on what she was doing, getting it right. The hair was fine and thick against her palms and she could hear Sylvia’s breathing slow and soften.
As she tucked the last pin in, securing the ends, she said “All right?” and dropped her hands to Sylvia’s shoulders.
Sylvia met her eyes in the mirror and nodded. She was relaxed and pliant under Lucy palms.
The moment hung in time.
Sylvia arrives on 10th July from JMS Books!