Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
Jess Armstrong is an historian based in New Orleans yet fascinated by Britain in the twenties as it was portrayed by romantic novelists of the era. The Curse of Penryth Hall is her debut novel, and it’s set in a Cornwall where, with a nod to Hobbes, life was feudal, brutish and liable to be cut short. Here people revered witches. And here the author introduces her protagonist not, as might be expected, to fit her setting, but vehemently to deny it.
Ruby Vaughn is a feisty American gal and she doesn’t believe in witches. Orphaned but possessed of a family fortune, fleeing a shady past, she has fetched up in Devonshire in a decrepit mansion boasting a bookshop where she is vaguely employed by the nominated owner, Mr Owen. At 80, Owen is a suspect antiquarian who deals with anything, legal or illicit, from academic and classical to porn.
In the summer of 1922 Owen directs his reluctant assistant to deliver a case of books to a customer in a Cornish village, a destination that turns out to be too close for comfort to the home of Ruby’s former beloved friend Tamsyn. By way of delicate innuendoes one is given to understand that this relationship was different, of such a nature that accounted for the irreversible estrangement between the girls when Tamsyn married Sir Edward Chenowyth of Penryth Hall.
Irreversible then but Tamsyn has recently sent a desperate plea for help to her old friend which Ruby ignored. Of course they meet again, are reconciled, and the stage is set. It’s obvious, even before a dreadful dinner at Penryth Hall, that Sir Edward is a violently abusive husband with appalling table manners so no surprise and no spoiler that at dawn next day he’s found disembowelled in the apple orchard.
The subsequent investigation is complicated – with twists: the bumbling constable, the pantomime vicar, the enigmatic housekeeper (shades of du Maurier, of Gibbon’s: “something nasty in the woodshed”). And Ruby comes riding to the rescue of her beleaguered friend; Tamsyn, as the spouse, being the prime suspect, her vulnerability augmented by the existence of the family curse. Ruby is squired by the village pellar with whom she falls headlong in love even as the corpse starts to whiff in the wine cellar – locked securely against hungry footmen (sic).
Ruan Kivell is the pellar, a white witch with a ravishing body who views his own powers with a wary eye, particularly his ability to hear Ruby’s thoughts. She’s not unduly bothered by this and with his air of ancient mysteries and her own brash scepticism they make an original and entertaining team. In fact in all the exigencies of the investigation, despite suspicion of Ruby herself, the threat of the lascivious churchman, her near death from stoning by irate villagers, what shines through the grisly scenes are the exquisite passages between this unlikely couple: ostensibly an affectionate banter that is in reality a courtship dance, putting the reader in mind of exotic birds displaying in a jungle glade.
At the end Mr Owen announces that they will next visit Scotland – and they did. The review of The Secret of the Three Fates is still on-line. More significantly, in both novels Ruby considers Egypt, alluding to Mr Owen’s friendship with Lord Carnarvon and the unlikelihood of anything of interest ever to be found in that bleak desert that would in three months’ time come to be known as the Valley of Kings.
What can Armstrong be contemplating?
