Emily Starwood

Every stuffed bird in England is full of poison. Winifred Ashdown knows exactly how much – and that is why nobody believes her. Norfolk, 1896. Winifred is a taxidermist in a trade that swears a woman cannot practise it, and a widow in a city that has already decided what kind of widow she is. Her husband died of the arsenic that lives in every bird-stuffer's workroom; the newspapers made sure London remembers who mixed the soap. Now her shop is failing, her husband's name still hangs above the door, and her own is a headline. So when a letter arrives from Scald Hall, a decaying house marooned on the salt marshes of the North Norfolk coast, she cannot afford to refuse. The late Jerome Scarrow's collection of more than nine hundred mounted birds must be restored before its sale to the Natural History Museum. The pay will save her. The work is beautiful. The house is not. The housekeeper worships her dead master. The village is certain his young widow poisoned him. The kindly local doctor seems to be Winifred's only friend for miles. And the birds are wrong. Winifred can read a mounted bird the way a banker reads a signature – by its stitches, its wires, its stuffing, its glass eyes – and some of the collection's most celebrated rarities are telling her a story no one on this coast wants told. When the one man who could explain it is found drowned in a tidal creek, and Winifred was the last person seen with him, the "arsenic widow" from London becomes the easiest suspect on the marsh. To clear her name and save a woman the whole county has already convicted, she will have to prove the truth with nothing but the tools of her trade – before the Martinmas storm tide cuts Scald Hall off from the world.