Mummy Brown

About this book

London, winter 1881. On the night after the Great Blizzard, twelve-year-old Hester Lusk and Tib Fenner, an eleven-year-old colourman's boy, dig a hole in the frozen garden of a charity school for young artists on the Thames at Chiswick. What they bury is no bigger than a thumb: a tin tube of paint. Hester is the best draughtswoman the school has ever had, a liar of real skill, and she means to see a painting hung at the Royal Academy before she turns thirteen. Tib grinds the school's colours every Saturday and knows exactly what goes into them, including a rich brown that colourmen make from Egyptian mummies. A girl is dead, a portrait is finished, and something is missing from the patron's collection. Told backwards from the burial to the first day of term, this is the story of what beauty costs, and who pays.