Guns in the cellar, dripping tunnels, last-minute escapes: Simon’s visit to London goes awry from the outset. An urchin steals his letter of introduction, his host vanishes without trace, and scrawny waif Dido Twite is holding fast to secrets.

Black Hearts in Battersea is the second in Joan Aiken’s The Wolves Chronicles, though works as a standalone. It’s full of intrigue, spies, plots, and ripsmashing language:

“Hold your hush or I’ll lambast you with the salamander!” (23)

“We could snibble up now, it’s night-time and there’a only a couple of coves on peep-go.” (159)

“I’ve never had such a bang-up lark…” (162)

While Simon and Sophie are honourable, quick-thinking heroes, Dido Twite steals the scenes. She’s dismissed as a moulting sparrow, guttersnipe, piece of mousetrap, and brat - yet she endears from the start with her clever agenda, bravado, and idiosyncratic speech. She rises far above her “capsy, weevilly fortune” to hustle her friends and direct courses of action.

I like Aiken’s rare and specific vocabulary: coign, drugget, frieze, and bradawl, and that shipping words like forecastle roll from the children’s tongues. Aiken’s Dickensian names are a treat too: Midwink, Mrs Grotch, Scrimshaw, and Fibbins; not to mention locations like Loose Chippings and Chipping Fishbury.

There’s humour in unexpected places. After escaping the fire, the duchess laments her momentary loss of dignity:

“‘Such an indecorous thing to be obliged to do!’ sighed her Grace, fanning herself with a piece of cake.” (122)

I can imagine Aiken chuckling to herself at her desk.

There’s also something to be admired here in how the devilish, off-stage plot is glimpsed between the lines until it is properly discovered by the children and brought into the open narrative. And what a cliffhanger chapter ten closes with!

I’m reading this series out of order. I began with Night Birds in Nantucket (book three) and having lost my heart to its heroine, followed it with this one, book two. Next will have to be the original and most well-known of all - The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

All that remains is to say - borrowing the words of Dido Twite: Joan Aiken, you’re a bang-up slumdinger!

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Read on here for a review of Night Birds in Nantucket, the third in Joan Aiken’s The Wolves Chronicles.