Clouded in Clerkenwell
London, 1641. When their master dies in a studio accident, two ambitious painters conceal the body and seize the practice. Apprentice Henry Kentridge wants to open his own studio in Exeter; his fellow assistant Antonis wants something altogether more complicated.
Between them stands a disgraced anatomist who asks too many questions, a widow with designs of her own, and a country sliding toward civil war.
A darkly comedic novel about ambition, deception, and the small lies that build a life.
For readers of Ferdia Lennon's Glorious Exploits and A.K. Blakemore's The Glutton.
AN EXCERPT FROM CLOUDED IN CLERKENWELL
Chapter One
Evening of 9th December 1641 · Clerkenwell, the River Fleet
Three trinkets lay glinting in Henry’s palm: a single pearl earring, an onyx signet ring with a tulip carved in miniature — a distinctive family emblem — and a cameo of Sisyphus pushing his rock. As he stepped onto the moonlit St John’s Square, his gut lurched, sour.
Leave it to that man to own such lavish objects. Casting away these jewels would be risky. They connected Henry to this man, to the accident, and to the agreement. That was dangerous enough to ruin everyone. Sell them, and his family could eat for another year. But if his plan succeeded, they'd never go hungry again. They had to be sacrificed for his family's future. And to get shut of their owner.
A fierce wind whipped through Clerkenwell’s streets, slapping Henry’s cheeks numb and blurring his vision with tears. Were they from the cold or fear? His breath clouded in the air. He shoved his fists under his cloak and into his armpits and hurried toward the riverbank, his breeches sawing his thighs raw. Henry stumbled into an ice-filled pothole.
Over the past five years as a painter’s apprentice, he’d learned not to hope — hope was an absurd luxury that he couldn’t afford. But tonight, everything balanced on a scale between the prosperous life he craved and the noose that awaited if it all unravelled. Henry forced away the image of Nell learning of his execution and Benjamin growing up fatherless.
On the corner of Chick Lane, the Red Lion Tavern loomed ahead. Amber light spilt into the frozen night like warm oil. Shouts and laughter from drunken revellers crashed through the still evening. A savoury waft of sausages and roasted meats made him slobber and swallow hard. How the hell could he be hungry at a time like this?
Pickpockets used the tavern’s hidden trapdoors to discard their more troublesome spoils into the River Fleet below, but Henry couldn’t risk being seen tonight. Instead, he skirted along the river’s western bank. Two men stood with their backs to him, pissing on either side of the tavern’s entrance, their long, grotesque shadows flickering in unison with the torchlights. Head down, Henry passed them unnoticed and stepped away from the road onto the snow-covered bank.
He followed in the fresh footprints of an unknown man with a wide stride. The trail halted. Then he saw why. The previous man had squatted to shit, smearing an otherwise unspoiled canvas. Henry strode wide of it into fresh snow, and he took it as a sign. Here was where Clerkenwell came to purge unwanted and foul things.
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ABOUT THE NOVEL
London in 1641 was a city of painters' studios, most of which were caught between the powerful Painter-Stainers' Guild and the foreign masters who dominated royal patronage. The court favoured continental painters such as Anthony Van Dyck until his death that December. An English apprentice in such a city had narrow options. He could complete his apprenticeship and hope for provincial work; he could attach himself to a foreign master and learn to imitate; or he could find another way.
Clouded in Clerkenwell follows two assistants in one such studio — Henry Kentridge, a seventeen-year-old apprentice from Exeter trying to send wages home to a wife and son he barely knows, and Antonis van Laken, a Dutchman who once worked under Rembrandt and is now stuck in a workshop he despises. The novel grew out of my doctoral research on early modern painters and their material world, but its real subject is something the archive cannot quite tell us: what it costs to seek success, and what survives when two painters stop chasing approval and begin to forge their own way.
FIRST IN A SERIES
Clouded in Clerkenwell is the first novel in a planned five-book series following Henry Kentridge and Antonis van Laken through the upheavals of the English Civil War, the Interregnum, and the Restoration.
Each novel stands alone; together they trace two painters' attempt to survive a century of upheaval, on their own terms.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aimee Blackledge writes darkly comedic historical fiction set in Early Modern Europe. As an art historian (DPhil, Oxford), she came to the period through doctoral research on painters and their material world.
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