Angelina: Guardian of Secrets. Transitioner of Souls.
A Character driven Victorian saga with a 'dark secrets' thread.
Angelina Becory walks Birmingham's darkest streets during Victorian Britain's Industrial Revolution. As a midwife and handywoman, she brings life into the world and eases the dying out of it with her Irish Romani healing gifts - but even her strong shoulders can only carry so many secrets.
A brutal backstreet birth leaves a mother and child dead, and a boy hollowed by grief, igniting a trail of terrible curses that Angelina can't shake off.
Through a web of bad iron, a community in political chaos with riots and industrial accidents, she guards dark confessions of dangerous men. The kind that could destroy her if she ever dares to speak.
Angelina navigates the fetid streets and courts, the rise of the 'Cheapside Sloggers' (who evolve into the 'Peaky Blinders' and the 'Birmingham Boys') through Irish sectarian tensions, while industrial filth poisons the city's very blood. Using her dry humour, she walks the fine line between all religious and political leanings, becoming the unseen pivot to those who need her.
Set in the smoke-blackened courts and gas lit alleys familiar to readers of the Seller & Son series, this novella reveals the hidden history behind A Legacy Forged. Angelina's story represents the untold tales of the women who neatly held together the seams of Britain's Victorian working classes. The Irish Romani midwife whose hands catch the first breaths of the next generation of Sellers and Cahills, whose quiet courage shapes their fate long before they step into the light.
This is a voice from Victorian Birmingham you won't forget.