Sovay
by Celia Rees
Another striking young woman looks out of the cover of Celia Rees' latest historical novel from Bloomsbury, reminding us of her predecessors on the jackets of Witch Child, Sorceress and Pirates. This one is Sovay, the heroine not only of the novel but of a traditional ballad, quoted in full as an epigraph.
It begins "Sovay, Sovay all on a day/She dressed herself in man's array..." and refers to a young woman who dresses up as a highwayman to test her lover's loyalty. The novel begins with the same incident but it turns out very differently. In the ballad, the young man refuses to give up Sovay's love token to the "highwayman," proving how much he loves his fiancée, but James Gilmore is quite happy to yield Sovay Middleton's ring to "Captain Blaze" as the highwaywoman later comes to be known.
So our heroine dumps him and embraces life as a "gentleman of the road" as more congenial. This would have been material enough for a novel in itself and I rather regretted that it gave way so soon to Sovay's political adventures and unexpected involvement in the French Revolution.
The year is 1794 and both Sovay's father and brother are in Paris and in danger. And the villainous Sir Robert Dysart is trying to get them both into trouble in England by revealing their sympathy with the revolutionaries. Dysart lives in a an extraordinary house, like William Beckford's Fonthill - thus providing the Gothic element Celia promised in her interview with Armadillo in the last issue.
But there's more too: the dangerous streets of Paris, an encounter with Robespierre, the looming shadow of the guillotine... And Sovay's complicated love life. Who is really on her mind - dangerous Captain Jake Greenwood, a real highwayman, or Captain Théodore Léon,a soldier in the Revolutionary Army?
The story rollicks along but I was puzzled by an Afterword set in 1816, where Sovay's brother relays her fate to unnamed interlocutors. It felt a bit like having a final bracket without an opening one.
But fans of Rees's earlier historical novels about spirited heroines will enjoy Sovay too.