This novel brought me back to my days of reading Victoria Holt, Daphne DuMaurier, and Mary Stewart. Riordan has written a wonderful Gothic novel set in rural England in the early 1930's, when strict social conventions warred with personal needs and desires. Imagine Downton Abbey's Edith Crawley as a younger middle-class girl, struggling with her love for her child and the tremendous pressure applied by society to hide her shame by giving up that child. This is Alice Eveleigh, a naive office worker whose promising future is all but destroyed by one night with the married man whom she mistakenly believes loves her.
When Alice realizes that she is pregnant, her mother arranges for her to spend the summer with an old school friend, Mrs. Jelphs, the housekeeper at Fiercombe Manor, the remote Gloucestershire estate of the Stanton family. Mrs. Jelphs, by the way, is very nice, but remote and mysterious in a Mrs. Danvers kind of way. We are never sure how much she knows or if she is completely trustworthy. Mrs. Jelphs was a housemaid and, eventually, lady's maid at Fiercombe Manor back in the 1890's, when Lady Elizabeth Stanton was married to the erratic Lord Charles. Riordan alternates between the stories of Alice and Elizabeth, and if you have ever read this blog before you know that I love this technique! Elizabeth is pregnant and desperately hoping for a male heir, fearful of what will happen if she loses another child or produces a second daughter. Her journal, discovered and read avidly by Alice in the summer house on the property, reveals the musings of an increasingly desperate woman whose abrupt disappearance leads Alice to fear that she may also be cursed and that her unborn child may be in danger.
This novel is full of everything that true a gothic-lover could want - cobwebs, dark, deserted rooms, mysterious servants, ghostly presences, and more. I enjoyed it immensely.
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