On the morning of my 29th birthday, November 11, 1994, I was standing in the main auction room at Christie’s. The elegant space was crowded for the rare book auction scheduled to begin at 10 o’clock. There was an elevated stage at the front, and Stephen Massey, the head of the Rare Books department, had taken the podium. I was standing along one wall with some other Christie’s employees. Rows of chairs extended across the floor, filled with potential buyers and some gawkers. On the opposite wall was a bank of tables draped with black fabric, with phones for other Christie’s employees who’d be taking the bids of people calling in. The star of the auction that day was Leonardo Da Vinci’s CODEX HAMMER, one of his notebooks, 32 pages, written right to left, in his mirror handwriting, and featuring the famous image of the Vitruvian Man, among others (illustration).
 
People who attend Christie’s auctions are generally well behaved. They speak in soft tones, if they speak at all. No one shouts out or flaps their paddle around. But that day people could not stop talking; they couldn’t contain themselves. The auction began, the lots containing rare books and manuscripts, signed copies and first editions, and most of them sold well. But everyone was waiting for the Da Vinci notebook.
 
I believe the presale estimate in the catalog was somewhere in the range of 5 million. Between buyers in the room and on the phones, the bid began to climb: 6 million, 6.5, 7, 7.5 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20 …. By this time it was down to two bidders, one in the room and one on the phone, and the employee at the phone bank just kept raising her hand. Eventually the hammer came down at 28 million dollars to a phone bidder whose identity was kept confidential. Later, I heard one of the Christie’s employees say, “It went to someone named Bill Cates.” His friend replied, “Not Cates, Gates. I think he does something with computers.” It’s hard to remember but back in 1994, Windows 95 was still months away, and Bill Gates wasn’t a household name yet.
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​The reason I’m telling this story is because it was the first time I felt down to my bones the way suspense and story could swirl around art.

I wasn’t at Christie’s because I knew anything about art. I was a media buyer, in charge of purchasing print ad space for the sales Christie’s held over the course of the year, for everything from paintings and photographs to silver coins and Faberge eggs, Chinese and Latin American art, Hollywood collectibles and antique furniture. I placed ads in over 50 publications including the New York Times, Architectural Digest, the Newtown Bee, and Art and Auction. Because I was buying ad space, I had to read these publications in order to know what art to advertise where, so that’s what I did. For the first few weeks, I sat in my little cubicle and read magazines and newspapers. It was fun. (My dad always said, you’re never going to find a job that pays you to read! Ha!)
 
So like many things in my life I came to art—or rather, to my appreciation of art—through reading stories. About the pieces of art smuggled out of Wartime Germany by an American soldier, only to be found by his grandchildren forty years later, after his death. About the art heists and dramatic thefts out of museums. About the fire at the Pantechnicon in 1874 London, which destroyed $280 million worth of art and antiques (illustration). About the Renaissance painting by Cimabue that a 90-year-old Frenchwoman had hung over her kitchen stove for years because she thought it was a knock off. About the painter who fell in love with his subject and hid the finished portrait rather than selling it to her husband. And while I like art, it’s still the stories about it that fascinate me. Writing A Trace of Deceit, about the 1870s London art and auction world and a young woman painter at the newly opened Slade School of Art, was my way of sharing some of them.

Part of the reason I set my books in London in the 1870s is that for me this decade is one of the most interesting and progressive in Queen Victoria’s long reign (1837-1901). In the 1850s and 1860s, there were waves of social unrest, spurred in part by popular and sensation novels such as George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, M.E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White that represented bigamy, adultery, and spousal and child abuse; and by reports of famous legal cases and ardent discussions in the growing number of newspapers and journals. Quite a few bills on issues such as divorce, voting rights, property, child custody, education, and factory working hours were proposed but then shot down in Parliament. But during the 1870s, as Gladstone the liberal and Disraeli the conservative battled for the Prime Ministership and control of the government, a wave of legislation was passed in response to the call for policies that would secure public safety and wellbeing. Many of these had to do with the status of women. Below are some short synopses of legal trends and developments that reshaped England’s social fabric.
 
In 1856, the first Married Women’s Property petition and bill was debated in the House of Commons and defeated. The bill was one of several that would be proposed and killed before it finally succeeded in 1870. At issue was the fact that under the existing legal doctrine of coverture, a married woman could not own property; and if, as a feme sole (a single woman) she did own property, upon her marriage it became the property of her husband, unless her family had made a special provision or trust that secured her fortune to herself (and her heirs). Also, after 1870, working class women who earned a wage could actually keep it.  
 
In 1857, the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes bill received royal consent and was finally made law. Divorce became recognized as a civil (legal) and local process rather than something requiring visiting two courts and obtaining an Act of Parliament. With this law, women could now divorce husbands if (and only if) he had both committed adultery and committed one of the following four: incest, bigamy, cruelty (defined as bodily injury) or desertion for a period of four years. Men could still divorce wives for adultery alone. But hey, small steps, right? This law also had implications for child custody: now, for the first time, divorce courts had some latitude in assigning custody of children. And the 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act finally provided legal protection for abused wives. If beaten, she could apply for a separation order from a local magistrate (provided she had not committed adultery). Again—small steps.

​Until 1832, the only people allowed to vote in England were the wealthy landowners. After the riots of 1831, including some dangerous fires in Bristol that killed 12, the government became willing to consider a reform in order to avoid an outright revolt—or a revolution such as the one in France in 1830, when King Charles X was overthrown and hereditary right was replaced by popular sovereignty. The First Reform Bill of 1832 eliminated some of the rotten boroughs, where only a few voters still sent 2 MPs to parliament. It also extended the franchise to include all men who owned property worth at least £10—approximately one million of the seven million men. Encouraged by the Union victory in the American Civil War (1865), some groups of British men demanded more democracy and public influence. In 1867, the Second Reform Bill was passed, which extended the vote to 2/5 of the male population, to those men who earned £7 annually from rents or who had £50 in savings. In effect, this meant that urban working class men could vote; but the “feckless and criminal” poor was still left out in the cold. However, the fact that the vote was being extended to members of the middle classes provided hope to some suffragists that it might one day be extended to women.  In 1866, Barbara Bodichon spoke on women’s rights in Manchester, and Lydia Becker, later the editor of the Wall Street Journal heard her and was profoundly affected. That same year, the Women’s Suffrage Petition was carried to Parliament and defeated … and England did not grant women the vote until 1927, eight years after the vote was given to women in America. 
 
There was reform in the area of education as well. In 1862, Lowe’s Revised Code was an attempt to institute “payment by result” in schools. Matthew Arnold disagreed vehemently, saying this policy would only provide the rich with better educations and the poor with worse. In 1870 the Educational Endowments Act (aka the Education Act) made education compulsory for all children of ages 5-13 in England and Wales and set up school boards.
 
Beginning with the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802, various bills were proposed—and some passed—in an attempt to secure decent working conditions for women and children, particularly in the textile industries. These included dropping the work week hours to 55, and then the working days to 12 hours, or 10. But it was very piece-meal and incomprehensive until finally in 1878 the Factory and Workshops Consolidating Act brought together all regulated industries under one statute and stiffened enforcement of workshop regulations by placing power in factory inspectors. Some industries still remained unregulated, but the movement toward safety and reasonable conditions and hours in all workplaces was cresting.

​Perhaps the largest global political change however, occurred in 1871, when the balance of power tipped in Europe as a result of the Franco-Prussian War that began July 1870 and ended only a few months later. Before the war, Otto von Bismarck longed to unite all the German states and regions into one entity. In 1870, working as the chancellor, von Bismarck misrepresented the contents of a telegram in order to antagonize France and stir up resentment in Berlin. As a result, France declared war. The southern states, including Bavaria, were largely unarmed, and in the new situation, set aside their wariness of the northern Prussian states and asked for their protection. Von Bismarck had been stockpiling weapons and troops at the French border, and the moment war was declared, they rolled toward Paris, laying siege on the city and taking control within a matter of months. When France surrendered, the May 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt gave Germany the Alsace region and part of Lorraine, and awarded Germany millions of francs worth of reparations and the right to occupy France until they were paid. Germany’s consolidation, France’s determination to reclaim the Alsace-Lorraine region, and British fears that Germany would use their occupation of France as a pretext for further expansion altered the political landscape of Europe forever and became some of the underlying causes of WWI.