Katherine Mezzacappa’s new book, Lucie Dumas, is on tour and she’s offered an excerpt to entice you. Follow the Coffee Pot Book Club tour for all the stops.
London, 1871: Lucie Dumas of Lyon has accepted a stipend from her former lover and his wife, on condition that she never returns to France; she will never see her young son again. As the money proves inadequate, Lucie turns to prostitution to live, joining the ranks of countless girls from continental Europe who’d come to London in the hope of work in domestic service.
Escaping a Covent Garden brothel for a Magdalen penitentiary, Lucie finds only another form of incarceration and thus descends to the streets, where she is picked up by the author Samuel Butler, who sets her up in her own establishment and visits her once a week for the next two decades. But for many years she does not even know his name.
Based on true events.
Think of the kind of man from whom I earned a living. He might find himself on the Strand in an effort to ‘see life’, by which he means a visit to the Argyll Rooms, or some theatrical diversion enabling him to peer through his opera glasses at a dancer’s stockinged legs. His senses have been inflamed by the sight of a French dancer at the Royal Alhambra (why royal?) kicking her leg well above her head. He may have stood some overpriced drinks in the first establishment, but still sober himself, will have convinced himself that his fair companions might harbour disease and so he declines the walk up the narrow staircase nearby. He may have loitered at the stage door in pursuit of the dancer, only to be discouraged by the number of young bloods who have had the same idea. At Madame Louise’s he knows he will be treated in the way he believes he deserves: his coat eased from his shoulders, a glass of champagne placed in his hand, and a clutch of simpering young women in deshabillée paraded before him. He tells himself he is here for the good of his health. For the right fee he had found the quack who has given him the agreeable advice that it would be harmful to him to attempt to retain his seed but to remember that onanism is frowned upon in scriptures. It is thus his duty to his own health that closes the door behind him and one such as me.
In an establishment like Madame Louise’s he also feels safe. It is not a place where he would fear having his pockets rifled while he slept. If he were to venture out into the street, at the end of an encounter with one of Madame’s girls, how long might it take him to hail a hansom cab? No, better to remain in that warm, comfortable bed until daylight, when coffee is brought. None of this was about tenderness for me but about the gentleman’s own convenience.
I preferred these overnight gentlemen for a simple reason. They were less likely to be married, in my opinion, though married men of a certain class can always tell a damp-eyed wife that he passed the night at his club. There is, I think, all the difference between stumbling home late smelling of brandy and rousing a sleepy manservant before tumbling into bed to snore beside a wife in curl-papers and not coming home at all. In my present abode I am visited by appointment, and almost always in daylight. At night I sleep alone.
I know there is much printer’s ink expended on the scourge of those who will not work – referring to those at the bottom of the cesspit – the idle poor, in other words, those who circulate through the Poor Wards, Wandsworth Prison or who batten onto the religiously-minded, those respectable ladies who ladle soup in Stepney because they believe that whatever they do for the least of these they do for the Lord himself. For me, the greater danger are not the so-called idle poor, who after all have to make some effort if they are to live at all, but those who do not have to work, who would not know, many of them, how to tie their own cravats (I know, as I have performed this service for numberless bleary aristocrats, my overnight guests of Covent Garden). Such men have enough wealth that they can buy and discard other human beings, while arguing that they are the possessors of both what they would call ‘tone’ (and I ton) and the wherewithal to employ others who might otherwise have no gainful role in life at all. By the latter I mean their footmen, scullery-maids, parlour-maids and all those who cling to their servile place in the petty little hierarchies of the great English home. How is it that the life of leisure of such men is considered to be an adequate role model for all those who will never have the opportunity to live in that way? Now, I know Monsieur could be categorised as such (even if he has never passed the night here). From his friend Mr Jones I have learned that Monsieur has inherited enough money from his father that he need not work, but that it was not always so. However, I know, again from Mr Jones, that Monsieur is industrious. Yes, the pair of them disappear for weeks on end to Italy, leaving me to my other five callers and the occasional appearance of Monsieur’s man Mr Cathie, who kindly takes me out to tea, and the kneadings of Marquis’s claws on my lap on afternoons when I sit near the open sash, breathing the hot, dry, metallic smell of the summer street. But Monsieur comes back from these travels fired up with one theory or another that he must write up for an unappreciative public, with photographic plates in need of development, paintings he needs to finish. I learn all of this from the admiring Mr Jones and from Mr Cathie, without whose skill those photographic plates might never be developed.
Monsieur has never asked me to sit for my own portrait, neither photographically nor in oils. If I am to be remembered at all, it will be for these words.
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Author Bio
Katherine Mezzacappa is Irish but currently lives in Carrara, between the Apuan Alps and the Tyrrhenian Sea. She wrote The Ballad of Mary Kearney (Histria) and The Maiden of Florence (Fairlight) under her own name, as well as four historical novels (2020-2023) with Zaffre, writing as Katie Hutton. She also has three contemporary novels with Romaunce Books, under the pen name Kate Zarrelli. The Maiden of Florence was shortlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association Gold Crown award in 2025 and has also been published in Italian.
Katherine’s short fiction has been published in journals worldwide. She has in addition published academically in the field of 19th century ephemeral illustrated fiction, and in management theory. She has been awarded competitive residencies by the Irish Writers Centre, the Danish Centre for Writers and Translators and (to come) the Latvian Writers House.
Katherine also works as a manuscript assessor and as a reader and judge for an international short story and novel competition. She has in the past been a management consultant, translator, museum curator, library assistant, lecturer in History of Art, sewing machinist and geriatric care assistant. In her spare time she volunteers with a second-hand book charity of which she is a founder member.
She is a member of the Society of Authors, the Historical Novel Society, the Irish Writers Centre, the Irish Writers Union, Irish PEN / PEN na hÉireann and the Romantic Novelists Association, and reviews for the Historical Novel Review. She is lead organiser for the Historical Novel Society 2026 Conference in Maynooth, Co. Kildare.
Katherine has a first degree in History of Art from UEA, an M.Litt. in Eng. Lit. from Durham and a Masters in Creative Writing from Canterbury Christ Church.
Connect with Katherine
Website • Facebook • Instagram • Bluesky
Amazon Author Page • Goodreads
Follow the tour:
https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2026/03/blog-tour-lucie-dumas-by-katherine-mezzacappa.html
#historicalfiction #victorianlondon #truestory #womensfiction #blogtour #TheCoffeePotBookClub
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Charlene Newcomb’s passion for Star Wars and historical fiction led to her writing a bit of both. She has multiple short stories in the Star Wars Adventure Journal, published her space opera Echoes of the Storm, and has written medieval historical fiction short stories and five novels: the Battle Scars trilogy, and Tales of Robin Hood.
Download her free medieval short story, A Boy’s Life – about 9 year old Allan A Dale – and dive into 12th century England.
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