The Repentants

Kate Foster

A CHURCH minister’s order that two women, from opposite sides of the tracks, must don sackcloth and publicly repent their sins sparks an unexpected bond between them… and launches a sea voyage which will take them to an inhospitable land in one of the coldest and remotest parts of the world.

Kate Foster, the feminist author whose debut, The Maiden, won the Bloody Scotland Crime Debut of the Year and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, returns with The Repentants, her fourth coruscating novel, which retrieves a little-known slice of 18th century Scottish history and reimagines women whose fates were at the mercy of a turbulent age of exploration, exploitation and even banishment.

Foster’s mission is to give a voice to time’s forgotten women and their very real, lived experiences. And in this chilling (on all counts!) tale of betrayal, exile and survival – which moves from the east coast of Scotland to the wild wonders of Iceland – she found her inspiration in a proposal by Scottish merchants to annex Iceland as a remote British penal colony. It was a plan which did not ultimately amount to anything but its existence was the fuel that fired up Foster’s (pictured below) fertile imagination and laid the foundations of this riveting historical novel which transports readers back to the world of 1790 when strict, male-dominated kirk doctrine ruled people’s lives… leaving women fearing the actions of men more than they did the threats of the Devil.

Only two years into what is already a loveless and passionless marriage with Jonny Aitken, ambitious owner of both a coalworks and a lucrative salt business, 21-year-old Florrie knows that in the small settlement of St Monans on the Fife coast you can’t be too careful because ‘walls have ears’ and ‘windows have eyes.’ But enough is enough for Florrie and, putting aside her initial reservations, she is breaking all the rules to enjoy a ‘day of pure bliss’ with a transient Danish fisherman in a local inn. What she didn’t anticipate was to be caught in the act and dragged before St Monans kirk session to be judged and punished.

The minister’s judgment is that Florrie wear sackcloth and be publicly paraded in church as a repentant alongside Eliza Wood, one of her husband’s bonded salt serfs… a beautiful, outspoken young woman whose sin is failing to attend sabbath services, and whose open defiance is not something that Florrie has ever dared to ‘dabble’ with.

Despite their different social status, Florrie and Eliza form a quick and unusual bond over their mutual humiliation. Recognising that Eliza is a woman who can’t be intimidated, Florrie insists that she must come along as her maid when Jonny leaves Scotland for a potentially lucrative salt trade venture in Iceland.

Far from home, isolated and fearful in the freezing temperatures of Reykjavik, the two women grow ever closer and join forces with Hallgerd who, along with her absent brother, owns the biggest homestead in the town, but fears that all she has is under threat from a Danish count who is eager to open up a new Icelandic salt works with the help of Jonny Aitken. And then Jonny reveals his sinister ultimate plan… he will leave Florrie in Iceland, banished for the shame she has cast upon him. Knowing she must escape, Florrie turns to her resourceful friend Eliza for help… only to discover that nothing is quite as it seems.

The Repentants unfolds through the alternating voices of Florrie and Eliza, a powerful and insightful format which provides readers with an emotionally-charged understanding of how the often debasing experiences of two women from very different social classes might not be as far removed from each other as one might initially have suspected.

Foster shows us that despite the yawning societal chasm between what is essentially the master’s wife and the salt serf, both women face the same misogyny, the same daily restrictions, and even the same cruel punishments when they are deemed to have somehow ‘transgressed.’ Employing her trademark elegant prose, which belies the menace and darkness of Florrie and Eliza’s stories, Foster sweeps us into the shadowy corners of 18th century Scotland with its patriarchal privations, humiliations and bullying, and then on to the remote, freezing and unforgiving shores of Iceland where the two women join forces with the hardy Hallgerd… and the fightback begins.

In a world where women had few rights, and were virtually the property of their husbands with little say over their own bodies, it is this trio of indomitable survivors who steal our hearts, refuse to surrender to the bullies, and act as a beacon of hope and strength in an age of intimidation and female repression. Packed with danger and determination, revelations and revenge, suspense and plot twists, The Repentants sees Foster at her masterful storytelling best!
(Mantle, hardback, £18.99)