1997 romantic mystery. Kate Herrick was married, then very soon
widowed, during the War; a few years later, she travels to her
childhood home, to sort out the furniture that'll be sent to her
grandmother in Scotland. And to get some papers left in a safe. But
they're missing…
This is a very gentle book. Even more than in Thornyhold,
there's no real opposition: Kate learns things, and puts together
disparate bits of information, in order to work out solutions to the
various puzzles, but even if she'd simply ignored all the strangeness
everything would have come out all right.
Kate never knew who her father was, and when her grandfather died her
grandmother's sister arrived to "keep her company". But the sister was
a horrible religious nutter and so Kate's mother ran away, everyone
assumes with the gipsies [sic] who were nearby at the time, and was
later killed in a bus crash in Ireland.
Which wouldn't seem to be much of a mystery, but someone knew where
the hidden safe was, and apparently had a key for it…
So that's the plot; but much more of the book is given over to a kind
of nostalgic tourism, depications of village life of the sort that was
fading even before the war but still just about carrying on afterwards
(before cars got cheap). It's self-indulgent, but even at 81 Stewart's
a sufficiently good writer that I find I don't mind. (She would have
been 29 at the time the book is set, and I assume that there's a
certain amount of real-world detail here.)
She was a dumpy little creature, with the pink cheeks and blue eyes
of a long-faded prettiness, and wispy grey hair that was rather the
worse for its morning among the lupins.
That works very well. The changes in Kate's life seem rather less
effective; all right, Kate is independently wealthy thanks to her late
husband's will, but by the end she's decided to live in this cottage
in a small village; is she really going to be happy there? What's she
going to do? And while she may have known her new beau when they
were both children, they've got about two days' experience of each
other as adults; it's a little too pat, not least because (in the
first person narration) Kate doesn't appear to have any particular
feelings for him.
This was the last of Stewart's novels. Having now reread all the modern
ones, I'm glad to have done so; the quality varies a bit, and I'd
probably put her acme in the early 1960s, but they're all worth going
back to.
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