The Crimson Bed

Loretta Proctor

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Why I wrote this book

Family secrets have played a large part in Loretta’s life and are woven into her stories. The Crimson Bed is a story of sexual secrets and feelings people hide out of shame, afraid of tarnishing the carefully constructed respectable image presented to the world.. The psychologist Carl Jung called this the Shadow side of our natures. Yet this dark, unmanifested part of us is often the repository of much creativity and adds depth to our character. A painting without its mysterious shadows is flat and incomplete.

The Crimson Bed was inspired long ago by an unusual pencil drawing by D.G. Rossetti called ‘How They Met Themselves’. It shows an idealised couple (himself and Lizzie Siddal) meeting their ‘doppelganger’ in a dark wood. Rosssetti drew this on their honeymoon, a strange foreboding of Lizzie’s eventual suicide. This picture has always had great fascination for Loretta. She doesn’t read it as a sinister ‘doppelganger’ but rather in the Jungian sense of the meeting within of the male and female, spiritual and carnal sides of human nature, often reflected in real life by two couples who become friends and are contrasted with one another. She seeks in ‘The Crimson Bed’ to show how her characters ‘met themselves’ through the contrasting relationships of Fred and Ellie and Henry and Tippy.

However, this story really came to being after reading Sarah Waters excellent novel ‘Fingersmith’. Loretta loves Waters way of dealing with the Victorian Era, the convolutions and twists in the plot and the realistic and down to earth descriptions and scenes. Loretta’s first book ‘The Long Shadow’ is set in Greece during World War One. Reading ‘Fingersmith’ made Loretta want to explore and write about the Victorian era for her next novel and, with her love of Pre-Raphaelite art and painters, it seemed only natural to weave Art into the plot in some fashion.

Synopsis

Frederic Ashton Thorpe and his best friend, Henry Winstone, are artists immersed in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, with its yearning for romantic escape from the materialism of Victorian society. Seeing a half-finished portrait of the beautiful Eleanor Farnham at Henry's studio, Fred is fascinated and returns in order to meet her. He and Ellie fall in love and are married. But every heart hides a secret and both Fred and Ellie have put certain events behind them events that, if exposed, could threaten their blissful new life. After her mother's death, Ellie inherits the Crimson Bed, a family heirloom passed down through the female line since Elizabethan times. With the bed come ancestral secrets that will eventually affect Ellie as much as the unhappy memories from her own past. Meanwhile, Fred is haunted by shameful memories of his own, that lead him into the darkness of the London slums and a very different world to that of his peaceful home. As a brilliant and talented artist, Henry is beginning to experience success and fame, but his life is haunted by tragedy and loss. Despite their own problems, Ellie and Fred watch in despair as he sinks slowly into drink, illness and decline. Passions escalate as Fred becomes increasingly jealous of Ellie's closeness to her handsome godfather, Lord Percy Dillinger, and when shocking truths finally come to light, their lives will never be the same again...

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