An Interview with Author Charlotte B. Plumb

That's the thing.

I mean, with this particular bargain, she has seen the darker side effects in that she even talks about one of those bargains that goes so wrong for the person who made it in that somebody dies in order for them to get money that would help them.

And it's that whole Do you appreciate the person that was there? So there was one where they'd wished for something to happen and they lost their son and it taught them to appreciate their son, but he was no longer there

for them.

Oh, I'm wondering which part you might be referring to there because I'm not sure.

That was talking about one of the bargains that went wrong.

Oh, OK, because the ones I think the ones in the story, there's a mention of sort of a woman who wants her husband to stay faithful to her.

And so she trades, you know, a number of years for that and it goes wrong.

And I think the other one I mentioned was a man who basically he I think he desperately wants her.

Money, I think it is.

And the way that he's given the money means that he's exposed for making a deal and it all goes horribly wrong.

And so, yeah, there are these examples of people that Ida has observed where, in her view, it always ends

grimly or it has a bad ending.

And she has kind of created this... sort of narrative in her head that all the people that come for Pax are, they're greedy, you know, they're just, they're jealous, they're driven by avarice or greed or whatever it might be.

And so she's very disparaging of those kind of people and she resents having to bring these people to Mr Knight who is the demon that they are indentured to but of course throughout the course of the story she kind of has to face her own hypocrisy a little bit because and she realises yeah sometimes people who are in desperate positions have to make desperate decisions and it's not always you know an easy clean cut case of good and bad Absolutely.

And also, obviously, she saw the absolutely disaster of what happened to get her in this situation in the first place with her father, because he's the one that started them on this destructive path in the first place.

Yeah.

yeah so that's that was a big part of it and i think it kind of you know there's kind of an element of um generational trauma there basically um and sort of um you know the weight of inherent of inheritance basically and the big part of it being that eda's father made this pact with the demon, Mr. Knight, because he wanted so badly to bring his dead wife back and the children's mother.

But that demanded a huge sum of years.

And so his father agreed to pay it by bringing other people to Mr. Knight instead.

But when their father passes away, it passes on to the children to inherit that debt.

And there's all this resentment which kind of gets in between the siblings.

She has two older brothers, Ben and Laurie.

And I really wanted to explore how does that situation kind of affect an otherwise very closely knit family because they have to push the rest of the world away because they're involved in this very dark situation.

dealings that's illegal you know pack making is very taboo in this world and so they have to push everyone else away and it's just them um it's you know eda's whole life is the family shop where they they live and work and her brothers and whilst that's her entire world there's still friction there because her brothers remember their father more fondly than she does um and that was really interesting to kind of dig into how the siblings are different to one another