Ariadne Pritchett

A surprisingly decent read, considering its basically a cheap dimestore gothic novel.

The first half sets up the story nicely. Enid Garth is a beautiful young woman who has lived a heretofore hardscrabble life. After losing her parents at a young age, she was sent to an orphanage, where she gathered enough education to set herself up as a governess. It is while she is employed by Lord and Lady Dunsan that she returns to the Cornish coast. The Dunsan yacht is wrecked during a horrible storm, and Enid is the sole survivor. She is rescued and taken to the nearby village of Goat's Head to recover, and the local lord is called to help.

Daniel Hawks is a man with a shadowy past. He has taken care not to be seen around Goat's Head more than is absolutely necessary, preferring to hole up at his estate, Karamour, where he lives with his young children, his mistress of six years, and a handful of servants, whom he brought over with him from his former life in the West Indies. Hawks basically takes one look at Enid and decides she must be cared for at Karamour, so he takes her with him, much to the consternation of pretty much everyone in town.

When he brings Enid to Karamour, his housekeeper Hanna takes one look at her and knows that if she stays, she will bring nothing but trouble to the Hawks family. She refuses to nurse Enid, so Hawks brings in another villager, Mrs. Whipple, to do the job.

Mrs. Whipple lives by herself, eeking out an existence as a midwife and keeping a lodger on the side. Her lodger is Leigh Rainey, the local schoolmaster - or at least, someone posing as a schoolmaster. It's heavily hinted that Hawks is not the only point in this sordid triangle to be keeping secrets, even before all of those secrets are laid bare.

Turns out that Hawks made his fortune in the slave trade, and he married the daughter of a plantation owner in the islands, who died when their youngest child was still in nappies. Unfortunately, Enid bears a striking resemblance to Hawks's dead wife, and he quickly becomes obsessed with her. His mistress, Nancy, is full of rage and jealousy at this, and is determined to get Enid out of the house, one way or the other.

Meanwhile, Rainey is doing his best to strike up a friendship with the man he believes is the leader of a smuggling ring, Jeremy Keen. He's casing the beach one day when he sees Enid running away from the surf "as if the hounds of hell were at her heels," so he escorts her back to Karamour, which only earns him Hawks's immediate wrath. Slowly but surely a love triangle emerges between Hawks, Enid, and Rainey, with forces playing against each of them.

The book kinda falls apart in the second half, mostly because it works too hard for the twist on the usual Cornwall smuggling ring bit. While I appreciated this variation on the theme, it was clumsily done. I also appreciated the fact that Enid was well aware of how dangerous Hawks was and pretty much did everything in her power to get away from him - no Stockholm syndrome for her! I didn't really buy her romance with Rainey, because it happened way too fast, but I suppose in times of heightened danger, emotions feel stronger than they normally would.

There is a huge climactic scene in a blizzard to end the book - we learn of Rainey's true intentions he is a special inspector for Scotland Yard investigating a colleague's death, all the bad characters get their due, and there's even a hastily added HEA to round out the "romance."

All in all, not a bad read. It's definitely the best gothic romance I've read in a long time, for whatever that's worth.… (más)