A Little Trickerie is inspired by the real-life case of Elizabeth, the “Holy Maid of Leominster”, who in the early 16th century appeared as an angel in the priory there and was later unmasked as a fraud. Little is known of the motivation of the real Maid, and it’s the privilege of the historical fiction writer to explore such a lacuna – to imagine how Elizabeth might have lived, and what her voice might have sounded like. This Rosanna Pike does with great panache: white-haired adolescent Tibb Ingleby is frankly and unashamedly herself from the first page, dancing and whooping with her mother “with a big hoot-hoot” and confronting Ma’s well-to-do boyfriend, who looks “like a bun on two legs”.
Raised in vagabond manner by her unstable Ma during an age of tightening vagrancy laws, Tibb regards the society around whose periphery she drifts with a healthy cynicism. She’s endured many horrifying traumas (the death of her infant sister early in the novel is particularly devastating), and the effects are not easily shrugged off, settling as “that old friend called the black snake” around Tibb’s neck, “making my breath grow shallow”.
