#historicfiction

[thenervouspeal]

NEW! Waltpaper T-Shirt! www.waltcassidy.com

[aftertheworldends-blog1]

The best friends bring you books #books #currentlyreading #amreading #historicfiction #bookstagram #reading #elizabethkostova #theshadowland #fiction #bookstagrammers #bookgeek #blanket

[marikraushaar]

The Wagner family with daughter Lotteva around 1910 #maudwagner #tattooists #guswagner #comic #comics #colourpencil #marlenekrause #kuš #historicfiction #graphicnovel #femaletattooist #tattoedlady #oldphotograph #pencildrawing #drawing #graphicnarration

[justmeandmybooks]

Friday Shelfie! 😄📖📚 #bookshelf #shelfie #RedQueen #ThirteenReasonsWhy #NeverAlwaysSometimes #TrialByFire #TheBoleynKing #fantasy #youngadult #romance #contemporary #historicfiction

[marikraushaar]

Work in progress... #maudwagner #comic #kuš #tattooedlady #tattooartist #graphicnarration #historicfiction #colourpencil #coloredpencils #drawing #illustration #comicartist #marlenekrause (hier: Experimentem amb l'Art)

[marikraushaar]

Before becoming one of the US first female tattoo artists, Maud Stevens worked as an aerialist at the circus - Full story coming very soon! #femaletattooist #comic #femaleartist #graphicnarration #graphicnarration #colourpencil #circusartist #trapeze #circus #maud #drawing #historicalcomics #historicfiction #tattooedlady #maudwagner (hier: Experimentem amb l'Art)

[marikraushaar]

Done!!! #maud #maudwagner #comic #graphicnovel #graphicnarration #historicfiction #historicalcomics #marlenekrause #coloredpencils #colourpencil #comicpages #kuš @kushkomikss #shortcomic

[richard-copeman]

The unauthorised biography of Cam Myers.

Episode 1, in which my entrance into the world is met with rapt indifference.

“They say we are born innocent. This is a lie. We are born into the consequences of our parents’ guilt.”— Cam’s Journals, July 1933.

My beginning was in the dying years of the 19th century, in Algiers, where the waters of the Mediterranean gently lap the sun-baked shores of the African continent.

It was on a Saturday, the 14th of October 1893 to be exact, the heat even more oppressive than normal thanks to the Veranillo de San Miguel or the Little Summer of Saint Michael.

Nearby, the crowded steps and alleys of the Casbah, worn smooth by the footsteps of countless generations, teemed with life—vibrant and chaotic. The air carried the aromas of spice and leather, the sweat of human endeavour, and the sweet scent of smoke spiralling from shisha pipes. Merchants’ calls rang out, echoing off the ancient sandstone walls, as huddled in the shadows, beggars—their faces etched with their life stories—sat on threadbare mats, hands outstretched in silent supplication. Gamins—or street urchins—kicked up dust as they darted in and out of the maze of passageways, pestering the European tourists, while above it all, the rhythmic clang of the blacksmith’s anvil and the echo of the muezzin’s call drifted over the rooftops—reminders of the divine amidst the chaos of daily life.

In a traditional whitewashed stone house, in an alley, a seam between worlds, just off the Rue de Rovigo where it frayed into the labyrinth of passageways, a young woman was in labour.

Behind its door of darkened wood, studded with iron, set back in the shade of an overhanging first floor, a sabat , I was about to be delivered.

Unassuming from the outside, the house presented a blind face to the world, its life hidden, just like the secrets of my parents.

Inside you would have found yourself in one of those quintessentially Moorish spaces where the line between inside and out dissolved. The courtyard, or wast ed-dar (centre of the house), was the heart and soul of the home—a cool, green sanctuary onto which the downstairs rooms opened. It was surrounded by ornate wooden balconies that overlooked the lush tropical planting, their weight supported by fine columns entwined with ancient wisteria. Oleander, agave, and ferns competed for space, while languid palms cast dappled shadows onto the terrace and the gnarled old olive trees growing in heavy stone planters. In the centre lay a pool—a rectangle of still, dark water—with a weathered fountain, its voice a whisper that lent the garden an air of peace and tranquillity.

The woman was Lebanese, a dancer from the Moulin Rouge, with raven hair, almond eyes, and an olive complexion; her beauty, once the talk of Beirut, remained undiminished by her unplanned and unwelcome condition. She was not, as they say, of this place; she had come to Algiers to be with her lover. He was a Captain in the 1er Régiment Étranger of the Foreign Legion, an elite sniper and the scion of a noble Spanish family.

She had met the Capitaine in Paris when she was working for the Deuxième Bureau, but had been forced to flee after her cover was compromised.

However, their relationship had changed with her condition, and followed the predictable trajectory of such affairs: initial ardour and infatuation turning to disillusionment, and culminating in that peculiarly masculine form of departure that managed to combine abruptness with drawn-out inconvenience. His departure had come seven months earlier, with a deployment—conveniently timed, some suggested—that posted him to fight on distant shores, leaving her with me, an unwelcome guest, taking shape within her. Only his valet, Salvador, a discreet Castilian, a legacy of his former life, had stayed to tend to her.

She was, as the few who remembered her would attest, not the sort of woman one expected to find in such circumstances. She had been celebrated in certain circles—the kind that existed just beyond the boundaries of respectable society.

And I, their undesired progeny, was delivered on that Saturday, just as the midday sun reached its zenith.

Salvador had been sent to fetch the midwife, a stout Breton woman with the hands of a Raphael Madonna, and returned with her a short while later. They arrived to find Mother reclining on a divan surrounded by Venetian cushions, an empty bottle of laudanum on the bedside table, her throat glistening with perspiration as each contraction seized her—waves of perverse pain borne on the ecstasy of opium and alcohol.

The midwife worked in silence, and when I finally slipped into the world, I emerged not with a cry but with a sigh, as though already weary of the vulgar spectacle of existence.

“It’s a boy,” murmured the midwife, holding me aloft, a glistening creature. The afternoon light caught my damp skin, transforming me momentarily into a being of liquid gold.

Mother turned her head away. “How very biological,” she muttered with perfunctory indifference as she reached for her enamelled cigarette case.

The midwife swaddled me and spoke soft words about a mother’s joy. She went to place me in her arms, but her gaze was distant, her heart devoid of feeling, seeing me only for what I was: an anchor to a love that had run its course. With a dismissive gesture, she turned away, leaving the midwife to wonder at the mysteries of the human heart.

They told me later that I had his eyes and her countenance, that I was healthy and handsome and quiet. But they were wrong; I wasn’t quiet, I was listening.

The midwife pocketed her fee and vanished into the afternoon lassitude, leaving Salvador—poor devil—looking uncomfortable holding what his master had left behind.

Upstairs, my mother lay idly tracing patterns in the smoke rising from her cigarette, while he went in search of the Algerian cook, whose own numerous offspring ran barefoot through the souk.

She had agreed to care for me, for now. Her lullabies, which carried the cadence of the desert and the ancient rhythms that predated all European pretensions, lulled me into a fragile calm.

Thus I arrived, facing a future as uncertain as the shifting sands of the Sahara. I was not only unwanted, but my olive skin would have been deemed a stain, had their limpieza de sangre documentation any relevance by then.

I liked to imagine that my father was told I was stillborn; a kinder fiction than the truth that echoed in the silence of my childhood. It was not that I was just unwanted, it was that I had been exorcised.

But let me tell you: on that day, beneath the Algerian sun, no one saw the life of adventures, still unimagined, being born in that moment—each one rooted in the consequences of passion.

And so, it pleases me now, in the relative tranquillity of my later years, to set down the singular events which forged the man I have become. They say to understand a tree, one must first know its roots. My own are buried in the soil of silence and exile. Thus to discover myself, I must not start here with my own birth, but with that of my grandfather in 1815.

Episode 2 shortly.