The Ruby in the Smoke
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| The Ruby in the Smoke | |
 A recent edition of Ruby in the Smoke with Billie Piper on the cover |
|
| Author | Philip Pullman |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | Sally Lockhart series |
| Genre(s) | Mystery, Young adult novel |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Publication date | 1985 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 200 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0192715437 |
| Followed by | The Shadow in the North |
The Ruby in the Smoke (1985) is a novel by the English author Philip Pullman. It was also adapted for television in 2006.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
The story opens in October 1872, where we meet our protagonist, the remarkably pretty sixteen-year-old Sally Lockhart. Her father, a joint owner of the shipping firm Lockhart & Selby, recently drowned on the schooner Lavinia when he went to inspect the firm's tradings in Singapore. Because of this, Sally is forced to stay with her distant aunt, Mrs Rees. While with Mrs Rees, Sally receives a cryptic, badly-spelled letter warning her to beware of the Seven Blessings, a phrase she does not understand.
To try and discern its meaning, she goes to her father's office to ask about it. When she questions the firm's secretary, Mr Higgs, his reaction is instant: he falls to the floor, dying of a heart attack. This further fuels Sally's curiosity, and she shows the letter to a friendly office-boy in the firm, Jim Taylor, a scruffy thirteen-year-old with a penchant for sensationalist writing. He becomes enamored with the mystery, promising to find out all he can.
Sally then receives another letter, this time from a Major Marchbanks, living in Swaleness, who warns of great danger and asks her to come and visit him. She goes, and is hastily presented with a loosely-bound book, while simultaneously being told that an enemy of hers, called Mrs. Holland, is in the house, and that she must leave immediately. On the journey towards the train back to London, however, she becomes aware of a figure following her — a woman in black. Desperate for a hiding place, she asks a photographer if he can help, and he ushers her inside his tent. He misdirects the old woman and gives Sally his card: Frederick Garland, Photographic Artist. On the train, Sally reads a little of the book before falling asleep — it seems to be a tale about her father's time in India, and somehow involves a legendary ruby. When she awakes, the book has been stolen, leaving her with only a single leaf of paper which had fallen out. Sick with disappointment, and unable to understand the cipher which is on the final page, she tells Jim about it, and his interest grows. Later, Major Marchbanks is discovered to have died from a gunshot wound at his home--although police suspect suicide, Mrs. Holland has arranged his murder.
Meanwhile, a sailor from the East by the name of Matthew Bedwell has arrived in London and taken up lodgings with Mrs. Holland, who runs a lodging house in Wapping and who shortly learns that Bedwell is an opium addict. Under the influence of the drug, he reveals details about the schooner Lavinia which interest the old woman, and prompt her to contact Samuel Selby, the shipping agent of Lockhart & Selby, to blackmail him with the information she has received. Bedwell tells Mrs Holland's badly-treated servant girl, Adelaide, that she must find a Sally Lockhart, so, under pretense of being on an errand, Adelaide goes to the firm of Lockhart & Selby and asks for Sally. Jim overhears her, and extracts all the information he can from her, learning about Bedwell and what he has said about the Seven Blessings, and finally that he has a brother in Oxford who is a Reverend. Jim tells Sally right away.
However, Sally awakes one morning to find that she has been robbed. Mrs Holland has contracted the same burglar to steal the missing page and kill her. He steals the page, as well as Sally's pistol, but finds himself unable to kill her; leaving Sally's house, he is himself killed by a mugger. Sally has copied the page's contents into a journal, but she is still shaken, and when she informs Mrs Rees about the robbery, Mrs Rees nastily blames Sally herself. Tired of Mrs Rees' tyrannical treatment, she packs her bags and leaves the house. With nowhere else to go, she pays a call on the photographer from Swaleness at his offices in Burton Street, and finds his photographic business in considerable financial trouble. She offers to take a look at the books if he, his beautiful actress sister Rosa, and their servant Trembler will provide her with accommodation.
Finding herself totally at home in the Bohemian household of Burton Street, she tells the siblings about Bedwell, and they are intrigued. Frederick uses Clerkenwell's Clerical Dictionary to find Bedwell's brother, and together he and Sally journey to Oxford to tell him about his brother. He resolves to get his brother out of Holland's Lodgings, and tells Sally he will pay a call on her at Burton Street very soon. Afterwards, while walking through Oxford, Sally stops in a photographer's and asks about the business, gaining a few very valuable ideas.
The Reverend arrives, and he and Frederick extract Matthew Bedwell from Holland's Lodgings, and after a period of recovery, he tells the assembled company — Sally, Frederick, Rosa, the Reverend and Jim — that Sally's father didn't drown on the Lavinia. He had been murdered by the captain of the schooner, under the orders of Ah Ling, the head of the Seven Blessings, a Chinese secret society (or Triad) that were in shady dealings with Sally's father's firm. He went to the East to try and discover, with the help of a trusted agent named Mr. Van Eeden, what was going on, and the leader of the society killed him.
Her pistol having been stolen by Mrs. Holland's hired thief, Sally is concerned for her safety, and asks Trembler to help find her a new gun. Trembler finds only an older gun which Sally is afraid to try to shoot because its barrel is so frail; if it shatters, she could lose an arm. Nevertheless, Sally feels she must try, and takes a practice shot in the backyard at Burton Street. The barrel holds up, but Sally discovers the gun's accuracy to be very lacking; it will be useless at anything but the closest range.
The Reverend is concerned that as his brother is still recovering from his illness, he may need more opium to prevent him from going into withdrawal. Sally and Frederick go to an opium den where Frederick had once taken photographs; while there, Sally breathes the opium smoke and recovers a mysterious fragment of memory from when she was a baby. Later, she, Frederick, and Rosa learn that Matthew Bedwell has been killed by thugs in Oxford.
By this time, Mrs. Holland has assembled some valuable information: an informant has spotted Adelaide on a walk with Trembler, and she has worked out the solution to the cipher in the last page of the book Major Marchbanks gave Sally, which discloses the ruby's whereabouts at an inn in Swaleness. Mrs. Holland and her hired bruiser, Mr. Berry, kidnap Adelaide and go to Swaleness to retrieve the ruby.
When Jim and Frederick learn of Adelaide's kidnapping, they immediately go to Wapping to rescue her. Sally arrives at Burton Street and is informed by Trembler of Jim and Fred's whereabouts; panicking, she decides to smoke the opium she had procured for Bedwell in order to learn the full truth about the memory of her past she had experienced briefly in the opium den.
In Wapping, Frederick and Jim retrieve Adelaide from Mrs. Holland's house, but Mrs. Holland has posted scouts on all the bridges out of the neighborhood, preventing their escape. While Fred fights off Mr. Berry, Jim enlists the help of an urchin friend to sneak Adelaide out by a network of underground tunnels, but the friend is revealed to have been in the employ of Mrs. Holland after all, and she finally traps them. Fred and Jim must fight Mr. Berry again, ultimately killing him, in order to escape, but in the commotion, Adelaide vanishes.
Under the influence of the opium, Sally discovers that her father was not Captain Lockhart but Major Marchbanks. Marchbanks, cripplingly addicted to opium, had traded his daughter to Captain Lockhart for the ruby, which Captain Lockhart had been awarded for protecting a local maharajah from a rebellion. Sally tells Rosa, who has arrived home at Burton Street, that she must find the ruby, and Rosa reveals that Jim has been storing it at the house; he had deciphered the riddle in Sally's book long before Mrs. Holland had. Sally arranges to meet Mrs. Holland on London Bridge, where she learns that Mrs. Holland believed she had a right to the gem because she had had an affair with the maharajah, who had promised it to her. Sally, concluding that the stone has caused enough pain, relinquishes her claim to it and throws it over the side of the bridge; Mrs. Holland, by now having driven herself mad with desire for the gem, throws herself over the bridge after it.
As Sally leaves the scene, a gentleman in a carriage orders her to get in; unable to think clearly after the stresses of the day, Sally obeys. The man reveals himself to be her father's trusted agent, Mr. Van Eeden, but the trust was misplaced; Van Eeden's alternate identity is that of the murderous pirate Ah Ling. Ah Ling tells Sally he had decided to kill her, but now gives her a choice instead: die, or run away to China with him as his wife. Sally knows she has only one chance to use her unreliable pistol; she shoots him and flees the scene. She and Rosa read in the paper the next day that his empty carriage was found full of blood, but with no body in sight.
Sally continues to stay at Burton Street, but the photographic business is failing and cannot be saved without a large infusion of capital. Sally is unsure how to save the business until she receives a final communication from the Reverend Bedwell, who has recalled that before he died, his brother mentioned that Captain Lockhart had told him to tell Sally to "look under the clock." Sally goes to the hiding place under the clock that she and her father shared in their old home, and discovers the money her father left when he sold his share of Lockhart & Selby--enough to save the photographic business--and a letter from her father, allowing her to truly say goodbye.
This book is the first of the Sally Lockhart Quartet:
- The Ruby in the Smoke
- The Shadow in the North
- The Tiger in the Well
- The Tin Princess
[edit] TV adaptation
An adaptation written by Adrian Hodges and starring Billie Piper was co-produced by the BBC and WGBH Boston. It aired on BBC One on 27 December 2006 [1] and on PBS's Masterpiece Theatre as the The Sally Lockhart Mysteries: The Ruby in the Smoke on February 4, 2007[2]. It will be rebroadcast in the United States on PBS stations on Masterpiece Mystery! The episode is scheduled for September 21, 2008.[3]
All four Sally Lockhart books will eventually be adapted for television.
[edit] Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Billie Piper | Sally Lockhart |
| Julie Walters | Mrs Holland |
| JJ Feild | Frederick Garland |
| Matt Smith | Jim Taylor |
| Hayley Atwell | Rosa Garland |
| Chloe Walker | Adelaide |
| David Harewood | Matthew Bedwell |
| David Harewood | Nicholas Bedwell |
| Robert Glenister | Samuel Selby |
| Elliot Cowen | Henrick Van Eeden |
| Miles Anderson | Major Marchbanks |
| Michael Seddonn | Jonathon (Urchin) |
[edit] References
- ^ BBC - Press Office - BBC ONE Transmission Details Weeks 52/1
- ^ Masterpiece | PBS
- ^ The 2008 Mystery Season.
