Autumn Lace

The bustle of Paddington Station barely suggests the chaos that awaits Miranda Courtney at the Welsh home of the wealthy Gethin Glendower. Her long ride on the Barmouth Express carries her safely from the threat of an unwanted marriage to a friend of her brother’s into another form of she is to be seamstress and modiste for the ladies of the Glendower household.The rural world into which she debarks bears little resemblance to the Victorian London she has left behind. A different tongue is spoken. The woods are still, thought to harbor witches. Most foreign to Miranda, though, is the conduct expected of her in the downstairs world of Ynys Noddfa, Glendower’s rambling seaside manor. Her beauty and sophistication, and her natural pride, soon antagonize the autocratic housekeeper and tantalize the house's lascivious butler.Fortunately she is rescued. Gethin Glendower and his ailing wife, Lora, recognize the quality of Miranda’s breeding and have her resettled upstairs. As a companion to Lora and to her daughter Angharad, Miranda witnesses and is mystified by the peculiarities of the family’s life. What is the unnamed illness that keeps Lora perenially bedridden? Why is Angharad maliciously rebellious, always addressing her father as Mr. Glendower, and sticking pins in her dolls? Most troubling to Miranda are the improper advances made to her by Gethin, and the passions that she longs to return and has trouble suppressing.Night after stormy night the tide sweeps in around Ynys Noddfa, cutting it off from the rest of Wales. On a night when it seems that this tiny island can no longer contain the tensions that possess its inhabitants, revelations, confessions of love, and a very mysterious death throw the household into frenzy.As in her first novel, Lord Rivington’s Lady, Eileen Jackson enhances the riveting plot with careful re-creations of the manners, morals, and style of the period. The cast of characters—family, servants, and tenant farmers—are all brilliantly portrayed as they move through the mossy woods and along the haunting coastline of Wales.