The Book of Lost Stories
Also by Trisha Ashley
Sowing Secrets
A Winter’s Tale
Wedding Tiers
Chocolate Wishes
Twelve Days of Christmas
The Magic of Christmas
Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues
Good Husband Material
Wish Upon a Star
Finding Mr Rochester
Every Woman for Herself
Creature Comforts
A Christmas Cracker
A Leap of Faith ( previously published as The Urge to Jump)
The Little Teashop of Lost and Found A Good Heart is Hard to Find
( previously published as Singled Out)
The House of Hopes and Dreams
Written from the Heart
( previously published as Happy Endings)
The Garden of Forgotten Wishes
The Christmas Invitation
One More Christmas at the Castle
The Wedding Dress Repair Shop
For more information on Trisha Ashley and her books, please see www.trishashley.com or visit her Facebook page (Trisha Ashley Books) or follow her on @trishaashley or see her website at www.trishaworld.com.
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Originally published in Great Britain as Lord Rayven’s Revenge in 2007 by Robert Hale Limited First published in Great Britain as The Book of Lost Stories in 2025 by Penguin Books an imprint of Transworld Publishers 001
Copyright © Trisha Ashley Ltd 2007, 2025
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In memory of my parents, Mary and Alfred Long
Prologue
Cleo
Finch
July 2024
The old-fashioned brass bell jangled as Ambrosial Books’ first customer of the day scurried out, clutching his purchase to his scrawny chest as if he thought I might leap over the counter and snatch it back.
Before the door closed, I caught a glimpse of a shaft of sunlight in the narrow street of the ancient Shambles in York, where the upper floors of the Tudor buildings overhung the lower, so that I often felt like some shy creature looking out of its burrow. Even on a bright day, the lights needed to be on to illuminate the maze of crammed bookshelves.
The door to the storeroom behind me swung open. Uncle Ambrose had been unpacking his latest finds from a country house auction, and now he backed out, carrying a large and battered cardboard box.
As always, since his sartorial taste had been set in his youth, Unks’ long silver hair was pulled back into a ponytail and he was dressed in the waistcoat and trousers of one of his ancient
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velvet suits, this one a dark plum colour, rubbed somewhat shiny around the knees and seat, and teamed with a striped shirt, the collar open and the sleeves rolled up. The odd addition of a smooth fur scarf that hung limply around his neck was actually his elderly Siamese cat, Tilly, who usually spent her afternoons playing dead in the shop window, to the consternation of passing tourists.
‘I just sold the Alexander Pope from the glass case,’ I told him as he plonked the box down on the counter in front of me, where it exuded a familiar blend of old books and immemorial dust.
‘It’s the early bird who catches the first edition,’ he said, then gestured to the box, looking pleased with himself. ‘Happy birthday, Cleo.’
‘You remembered!’ I said, astonished, because he was usually forgetful about these things and he hadn’t mentioned my birthday at breakfast.
‘I only remembered it was today when I opened this box, because it’s something I spotted at the last sale that’s just up your street,’ he confessed.
‘Well, this is exciting,’ I said, opening the flaps to reveal one of those small wooden desks, the antique kind that could be carried about and put on top of tables. It was resting on a layer of old books.
‘Late eighteenth century or early nineteenth, I’m sure,’ said Uncle Ambrose. ‘It needs a good clean and waxing, but it is a nice piece.’
‘I love it,’ I said, lifting it out and opening the top, to reveal a slightly ink-stained interior. ‘I could imagine Jane Austen using something like this, and it’s around the right period.’
He looked rather pleased with himself. ‘It was a late addition
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to the auction, brought in with some other lots from elsewhere, so I haven’t examined all the books yet, although the top ones seem to be by Mrs Radcliffe and her ilk, so you may find some you haven’t already got.’
I collect early Gothic novels and, in fact, was just in the later stages of finally finishing my PhD thesis on the subject.
‘I’ll go through them, Unks, and if there are any I don’t want I’ll add them to the stock catalogue,’ I promised, dying now to excavate the lower layers of books. ‘I might find a treasure trove.’
‘You never know,’ he replied, then vanished back into the stockroom, where I could hear Tom, the long-suffering student who helped out at weekends and in the university holidays, having a coughing fit over the rest of Unks’ latest dusty finds.
Left to myself in the empty shop, I put the little desk carefully to one side and began to delve into the box . . .
‘How’s my little Birdie?’ Tris asked, when his face popped up on the screen later that day. ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman coming along OK?’
I replied that my PhD thesis, Dark Reflections: the mirroring of the struggle for female emancipation in Gothic literature, needed a little rewriting but was almost there.
‘And how is Tristram Shandy and “A Vindication of the Rights of Man to Appropriate the Genesis of the Horror Novel From Women” ? Still on hold?’ I asked, although personally I didn’t think Tris’s thesis, From Monk to Monster: How Matthew Lewis walked, so Mary Shelley could rampage, would be a great loss to the literary oeuvre if it was never completed.
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These preliminaries over, we grinned at each other. We’d been best friends and verbal sparring partners ever since my parents were killed in a climbing accident when I was thirteen, and I came to live with my Uncle Ambrose over his shop in York.
Now Tris was living on the other side of the Atlantic and we were FaceTiming most days, it helped that he had always been nocturnal by preference. He’d been too busy yesterday to talk, but today I had something I was bursting to tell him.
‘Happy birthday,’ he said, before I had the chance. ‘Did Freddo send you a card?’
‘Yes, with a hoofprint on it,’ I said, for every year we sponsored a donkey at a nearby sanctuary for each other’s birthdays. Tris’s was called Martha. ‘What’s more amazing, though, is that Unks remembered it was my birthday too, and he bought me a present.’
‘Let me guess – it’s a book.’
‘It’s a whole box of books – Gothic novels he got from the last auction he went to – and a sweet little wooden desk, the sort without legs that just sits on a table.’
‘I know the kind of thing,’ Tris said. ‘Any of the novels interesting? Ones you haven’t got copies of?’
He looked at me quizzically, raising one eyebrow. He has a mischievous sort of face, but his eyes are a clear smoky-quartz grey and hard to look away from, even on a screen. ‘You look excited about something: come clean! What is it, some rare first edition?’
‘Well, there were some first-edition Orlando Browne books in the box, plus a couple of small non-fiction works by the same author that I’d no idea existed, among the later editions of Mrs Radcliffe and what Unks calls “her ilk”. It wasn’t those
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that were the most exciting find, but a sort of journal mixed in with them, a really old one with board covers.’
‘The plot thickens,’ Tris said, sounding amused, and his quizzical eyebrow now practically vanishing into his tangled mop of chestnut curls.
‘The journal certainly explains why there were first editions of all Orlando Browne’s works in the box, because even though I’ve only managed to make out the first few pages – the handwriting is minute and fills every bit of each page – it makes it clear that it’s written by him.’
‘Really?’ He sat up a little straighter. ‘That is quite a find. And it solves one argument, doesn’t it? Your contention that Orlando Browne was the pen name of a female author.’
He looked pleased with himself, but my next words wiped the smirk off his face.
‘No, actually, Tris, it doesn’t, because, as I knew from reading the novels, the author was a woman – Alys Weston.’
‘I suppose the journal is authentic?’ he said, fighting on into the last ditch.
‘Unks says everything about it rings true to him. He can’t get excited about any book or author before the nineteenth century, but the journal was begun in 1808, so he’s delighted his birthday present turned out to be so fascinating to me.’
‘It’s pretty fascinating to me, too,’ Tris admitted, accepting Ambrose’s expert opinion. ‘Tell me more.’
‘No, I want to hug it to myself for a bit longer. Also, I’ve just started to type it into my laptop, which is slow going since it’s so hard to read.’
‘OK, tantalize me a bit longer,’ he said, grinning. ‘But this means you’ll have to tweak your thesis a bit, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, but my contention in it that Orlando Browne was a
woman has now been proved, so I can add a footnote and make the necessary changes to the rest. And if you ever get on and finish your thesis, you’ll have to do a little tweaking, too.’
‘Funnily enough, finishing my PhD is one of the things I’ve decided I want to do in the near future,’ he said to my surprise.
Something about the room behind him, which I’d been too excited to take in until now, suddenly struck me, as did a lifesize hair-covered cardboard figure that chose that moment to topple over on to him.
‘Is that Chewbacca? Where on earth are you?’
He fended it off. ‘In my friend Jason’s spare room. He’s a massive Star Wars fan and stores all his memorabilia in here.’
I assumed Tris was away from home. He now has friends all over the States, not to mention that his parents had retired to Florida a couple of years back.
‘I’ll arrange about finishing my PhD when I’m over,’ he added. Chewbacca had set off a sort of chain reaction and he was now rebuffing Princess Leia’s advances.
‘For a holiday? Is Marcy coming with you?’
I liked Marcy, even if she had taken my best friend so far away.
‘No, I’m coming alone – and for good. Marcy and I have decided to split up.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said sincerely, because I’d always felt that calm, organized, sensible Marcy provided my mercurial friend with a bit of ballast.
‘It was her idea, although actually I was getting a bit tired of being sweetly reasoned with when what I really needed was a good fiery argument, like the ones we have. Anyway, there’s nothing to keep me here now and I want to come back to York. I’m really looking forward to seeing you again in three dimensions.’
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‘Unlike Chewbacca,’ I said. ‘And I suspect what you really want to see is that journal.’
‘That too, if you’ve stopped being dog-in-the-mangerish about it by then,’ he admitted. ‘I’ll have to be here for a few more weeks yet, so I don’t suppose you’d like to email me the typescript of the journal when you’ve finished it?’
‘No, you’ll have to wait until you are back,’ I said firmly. ‘I’m sure Unks won’t mind you staying in the spare room till you get yourself organized – when are you coming back?’
‘Around the end of the month, I should think. I’ve got some work to finish off first.’
‘Ah, yes, the great work of taking really good novels and turning them into TV and film scripts that bear no relation to the original.’
‘That’s it,’ he agreed, very cheerfully considering he’d just split up from his long-term partner and was now in a small room shared with two-dimensional people. ‘In fact, I’ve got a script to finish tonight, so I’d better get on with it. Same time tomorrow?’
‘OK, and may the force be with you,’ I said gravely, before he vanished from the screen.
It felt mean of me to be so happy that Tris was coming back home for good when it meant the end of his relationship with Marcy, but I couldn’t wait to see him again.
However, I had so much to occupy my mind that the time just flew by. Although I had started by transcribing the journal into my laptop with a view to altering my thesis slightly, by the time I’d got to the end, where the author had added details of
the events she described that she’d later gleaned from others, I’d become totally consumed by Alys Weston’s life story. It was like a Gothic novel in itself . . . and once the various characters had started to talk to each other in my head, that’s when I began to write a novel.
It just poured unstoppably out on to the page, rather like automatic writing and I was just the conduit.
I wrote night and day, so it was just as well it was Tom’s summer holidays so he could help Unks in the shop.
I only remembered to talk to Tris because I’d set my phone to remind me, and he said I looked more hollow-eyed and distracted every day – even more than he did, trying to finish his current work before leaving. He assumed I was having to make some major changes to my thesis after all and I didn’t disabuse him of that idea. I wasn’t yet ready to tell him what I was actually doing. I’d keep that as a surprise for when he’d got back.
I suppose most Lit grads think they might one day write a novel, and Tris and I had certainly talked about it, but I hadn’t envisaged that mine would be in the Gothic genre . . .
The first draft took me eleven days . . . and about that long again to stand upright and talk intelligently.
Then I set to and revised it, before printing it out and having it laminated and spiral bound, like the thesis it should have been. I wanted to hold the tangible proof of my first literary offspring in my hands. *
I’d recovered a bit by the time Tris arrived back in York one afternoon in early August. I certainly looked a lot better than
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he did, but then, apart from all the midnight-oil burning, he could never sleep on planes and then got dreadful jet lag. In fact, he looked just as hollow-eyed and glazed as I had until just a couple of days before.
His eyes lit up when he saw me, though, and, dropping his bags on the wooden floor of the shop, he swept me right off my feet into a bear hug. At six foot, he isn’t much taller than I am, but stronger than his willowy build might make him appear.
I hugged him right back. It had been so long since we’d been together that when the doorbell jangled and I’d looked up and seen him, I’d felt as if he’d been a stranger, but now, as he let go of me and grinned, it was suddenly as if we had never been apart.
‘How’s my little Birdie?’
‘Shut up, Shandy,’ I said.
I’m the opposite of a cute little birdie, being tall, dark and with mournful dark blue eyes that turn down at the outer corners.
‘You look dreadful, Tris. There are shadows under your eyes and blue was never your colour.’
‘It was a bit of a rush finishing work off and then a long flight, but it’s great to be here. Hi, Tom,’ he added, as the student emerged to take over the counter.
‘Come on, let’s go upstairs. Uncle Ambrose is looking forward to seeing you and he’s planned a welcome feast,’ I said, as the door jangled again, although not to let in a customer. Behind us rose a shrill, horrified female voice asking Tom if he knew he had a dead cat in his window.
‘Tilly up to her old tricks again?’ Tris asked.
‘Yes, and if Tom’s got any sense he’ll let the woman try and wake her up, and save himself a few scars,’ I said, leading the
way through the door marked ‘Private’ and up some ancient and twisty stairs.
Uncle Ambrose loved cooking and made a lovely dinner of grilled trout, new potatoes and salad, accompanied by a very good white wine, and followed by apple pie and cream.
He went out to the pub to meet friends after that, leaving me to stack the dishwasher and make coffee, which we took through into the small, wood-panelled sitting room.
Tris, who had revived a bit while eating and talking to Ambrose, now started to look increasingly spaced out and admitted he still felt like a zombie.
‘But a well-fed and happy one.’ He looked at me consideringly. ‘You’ve looked zombie-ish too for the last couple of weeks, but you seem to have made a miraculous recovery.’
‘That’s because I was not only burning the midnight oil, but the morning, noon and evening oil, as well.’
‘Revising your thesis in the light of your great discovery? Or was transcribing the journal a lot more difficult than you expected?’
I’d relented and emailed him my typescript of the journal just before he set off to come back, so he could read it on the way if he wanted to, on the strict understanding we didn’t discuss it until he was over his jet lag.
‘Neither. I’ve had . . . another project,’ I said, suddenly feeling strangely nervous about revealing what I’d been up to. None the less, I fetched the printout of my novel and handed it to him.
‘I’ll show you the journal tomorrow but in case you can’t sleep tonight, here’s a bit of bedtime reading.’
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‘If that’s your thesis, you’ve gone over the top a bit, haven’t you?’ he commented, then opened the cover and looked at the title page before looking questioningly up at me. ‘Lord Rayven’s Revenge by Cleo Finch?’
‘It isn’t my thesis, it’s a novel,’ I confessed. ‘After reading the journal, the characters just sort of started talking in my head and the book really wrote itself. It was the weirdest feeling.’
‘This whole evening is getting weirder and weirder,’ Tris said. ‘I’m having this hallucination where I think my best friend just told me she’d written a novel in less than a month and now everything around me has started undulating, so I think I’d better take myself off to bed.’
But when he did, he had my novel tucked under one arm in case, as I’d suggested, he couldn’t sleep and needed a bit of bedtime reading.
Lord Rayven’s Revenge
CLEO FINCH
Based on a true story
Means of Escape
The existence of the ill-used and sorely troubled Lady Malvina first impinged on Alys Weston’s consciousness in a nightmare, which she later ascribed to the roast duck she had eaten at dinner (sent over by the squire), and the sip of Papa’s port she took to fortify herself for the ascent to her chilly bedchamber. However it was, she woke very early next morning with the whole plot of a gloriously Gothic romance in her mind. Springing out of bed, she lit a stump of candle, wrapped herself in an old shawl and, tossing her long plait of dark chestnut hair over her shoulder, proceeded to get her ideas down on paper before the prosaic light of day could dispel any of the thrillingly dark miasma filling her imagination.
Her captors travelled night and day with scarcely a pause, save for such meagre sustenance as they carried in their packs, through countryside that grew ever more craggy and mountainous.
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Th e few sullen, sheepskin- clad peasants they met spoke in the language her mother had used to her in childhood, and Malvina came to realize that she was within the borders of Galbodia, beyond all reach of friends, family . . . or her beloved Alfonz.
The tall, raven-haired and sinister villain of the piece came to life on the page, rapidly followed by Malvina’s angelically fair betrothed, Alfonz. Then she added a ghostly, monkish figure, the plot and characters unfolding before her hurrying pen as she sat, frozen and exalted, before the little campaign desk that her papa had carried with him throughout his soldiering days. (It had fared rather better than he had, being battered but at least still all in one piece, which was more than one could say about Major Harrison Weston.)
The candle had guttered and died, and the sun long since weakly dragged its sorry self into the leaden sky over the Yorkshire moors, before she was disturbed. Miss Laetitia Grimshaw, once Alys’s governess, but now occupying a nebulous position somewhere between under-housekeeper and companion, popped her head around the door, looking quite distracted, and with her muslin cap over one ear.
‘Alys? Are you ill?’ she called softly, then, on catching sight of her seated before the desk, came right into the room.
‘Ill? No, of course I am not ill!’ Alys said, blinking away Malvina and her perilous situation . . . and especially the image of her tall, dark, harsh-featured and fascinatingly villainous abductor, Raymundo Ravegnac. ‘Why should you think so? I am never ill.’
‘Well, you did not let the hens out, and it is not like you to be late for breakfast, my dear.’
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‘Perhaps not, but I had the most brilliant idea for a novel in the night, Letty, and thought I had better get the bones of it down before I forgot it. Then it was so engrossing that I had no notion of the time passing.’
‘It was remiss of me not to notice your absence sooner, only the washerwoman is here and I was much engaged in sorting and counting linen.’
Laetitia’s general air of damp dishevelment and coarse cotton apron finally registered. Alys said remorsefully, ‘I had quite forgotten that Mrs Clarke was coming today to see to the laundry. Let us hope my blue cambric does not run out any more, for it is getting to be sadly grey. And you did remind her to take care with the sheets we have not yet turned?’
‘Oh, yes, although she is so vigorous at pounding them that she gets quite carried away. I had best get back to her. Shall I leave you to compose the rest of your little story, or will you come down now?’
‘This is not just a story, Letty, but is to be an entire Gothic romance along the lines of Mrs Radcliffe’s wonderful tales, which I am sure we must both know by heart. I will read the outline of it to you later, but for now I suppose I had better hasten to get ready.’
Letty looked relieved. ‘That would indeed be best, for although Saul has seen to the hens, I am afraid the major is having one of his better days.’
Their eyes met in mutual comprehension and Alys exclaimed, ‘Oh, no!’
Letty nodded, a strand of mouse-brown hair, sadly out of curl from the steam, escaping from under her cap. ‘Yes, the news the squire brought to your papa yesterday, of the terrible tragedy at Priory Chase, has so enlivened him—’
‘Enraged him,’ amended Alys.
‘Rage does enliven him,’ Miss Grimshaw pointed out. ‘So much so that he woke early, ate a coddled egg and dry toast and then sent down for the brandy, which he accused me of watering. I was quite quaking in my shoes, but I told him straight I would never dream of doing such a thing.’
‘No, for I do it myself, so your conscience is quite clear on that score,’ Alys assured her.
‘I don’t really know if it answers anyway, Alys, for if it tastes weaker he just seems to drink the more. And now he has finished the bottle, called for his boots and pistol, and gone into the garden.’
Alys sighed, for Major Weston, a feverish, emaciated invalid generally under the influence of intoxicating beverages, only now left his room when the fancy suddenly took him to shoot off his pistol in the garden. Since he had lost his left arm and the sight in one eye during the disastrous retreat of the Duke of York’s army through Flanders in ’94, and suffered frequent tremors due to a recurrent fever, his aim was not what it once was.
‘Let us hope Saul remembers to stand well back, once he has loaded for Papa,’ she remarked, for the young servant, though amiable and obliging, was not noted for his high intelligence. ‘He will not be of much use about the garden if he has a hole blown through him.’
Miss Grimshaw shuddered. ‘I am sure he learned his lesson that time the major singed his hat.’
There was a sudden explosion from the garden below and the tinkle of broken glass, followed by a noisy mass exodus of startled rooks from the trees that divided the Dower House from Squire Basset’s park.
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‘Oh, well, I suppose using empty bottles for targets at least gives them some use, even if we are picking glass out of the flowerbeds for ever afterwards,’ Alys said, then advised Letty to get back to the laundry. ‘Send Mary up with the hot water and I will be down directly.’
But by the time she had got downstairs the explosions and curses from the garden had ceased, and Saul, grinning as though he had just enjoyed a high treat, was assisting Major Weston back to his chamber, quite exhausted.
‘Good morning, Papa,’ Alys said dutifully, stepping aside to let them pass.
‘Well, Miss Slug-a-bed!’ he returned, his hollow-eyed face cadaverous in the dark passageway and his one, sunken dark eye burning with fever or drink . . . or possibly both. There were traces still of the handsome man who had captivated her mother into an imprudent runaway match with him so long ago, Alys thought, even though he was now quite pared down to bones, selfishness and bad temper.
He grasped her shoulder suddenly with a skeletal, shaking hand. ‘You have heard the news that Lord Rayven and his heir are dead, girl?’
‘Yes, Papa,’ Alys said cautiously, for she could not see that the accidental death of two people she had never met, tragic though it might be, could concern her.
‘And now the son of that cheating blackguard Hugo Rayven is to inherit all!’ His face grew dark and twisted with anger and his grip on her shoulder became painful. ‘You will have nothing to do with him, do you hear?’
‘Of course not, Papa. How should I? Our paths are extremely unlikely to cross.’
He stared at her for a moment as if he had forgotten who
she was. Then his hand dropped and he pushed past and went on up the stairs.
‘Now what maggot has got into his head?’ Alys muttered, as the stumbling footsteps passed overhead. Even Squire Basset, papa’s cousin, by whose kindness they were established in the modest Dower House on the estate, was not on visiting terms with the Rayvens of Priory Chase, which was situated miles away, near Harrogate, although he might, she supposed, have occasionally shared the hunting field with one or other of them.
Alys broke her fast with tea and bread and butter fetched from the kitchen herself, since Mary, the one maid of all work, was by now engaged in helping Letty spread the first sheets to dry over the lavender and rosemary bushes.
Alys had taken full control of the housekeeping before her fourteenth birthday, and mastered the art of driving a hard bargain in the bartering of chickens and eggs long before that, but it was Letty who seemed to find all the tedious little household tasks quite engrossing. A timid and self-effacing woman originally engaged by Squire Basset’s first wife as Alys’s governess, she had quickly and almost imperceptibly slipped into the role of general factotum to her strong-minded charge.
Due to Major Weston’s reclusive tendency, chronic invalidism and a selfish determination that his only child should devote her life to his care, Alys’s social circle was largely constricted to Sir Ralph and Lady Basset, his son, James, by his first marriage, and the rector and his good – too good – wife, Mrs Franby.
The nearby village of Little Stidding did not provide much in the way of amusement either, except for the weekly market,
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and although there were monthly assemblies in the nearest town, Alys had as much hope of gaining Papa’s permission to attend them as of flying to the moon.
Other than that, there was an unlimited supply of bleakly beautiful moorland to roam over, and a lot of sheep . . . among whom, of course, she did not include her dear Letty, to whom she was most sincerely attached, despite her being some twenty years her senior and quite scatter-brained.
So it was perhaps not surprising that Alys had found her only means of escape from this trammelled and unexciting existence in the world of novels and her own imagination. And now that she had set out on the writing of an entire novel of her own, she possessed a whole new world she could, godlike, create for her own amusement, peopled by creatures that must dance at her command.
Soon the squire would send down yesterday’s newspaper from the Hall and she would have to read it to Papa, when he had recovered from his exertions, although at least he did tend to be as meek as a lamb for some hours after these sessions.
Meanwhile, alone in the dining parlour with a half-eaten slice of bread and butter, Alys sat turning over possible pen names – male pen names – until eventually she fixed on Orlando Browne. She had no idea where the notion came from, but liked the sound of it very well.
Orlando Browne. Yes, he could take liberties with his characters and plot that a mere Miss might not, especially in the way of scenes of passion and violence, which she intended to sprinkle liberally throughout Lady Malvina’s history.
And her heroine would not be some frail, fainting creature –or, even worse, a pious bore – but a woman of sense and
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fortitude, who would be undaunted by the supposedly supernatural terrors that would beset her, for Alys was at one with the great Mrs Radcliffe in believing only in the rational.
Later, walking across the park to the Hall, Alys reflected that it was odd that the warm-hearted, good-natured, but undeniably vulgar second wife of Sir Ralph should have formed her literary tastes.
Lydia Basset had been an actress before her elevation to her present position, and she loved melodrama, adoring any tale that smacked of the Gothic. Alys, frequently called on in the afternoons to read to her until she fell asleep, soon found herself eagerly carrying each new novel home for a more earnest perusal once Lady Basset had finished with it.
She read and reread them, especially those of Mrs Radcliffe, who had, for some reason, ceased to produce any more after The Italian, and Alys became quite an expert on Udolpho and an intimate of The Castle of Otranto and Rackrent. In fact, she could probably have found her way around either blindfolded.
This had been her apprenticeship and she now felt fully ready to embark on her own novel. As to those other vital requisites of the genre – romantic scenery and gloomy mansions – well, there were rocky and precipitous outcrops enough to please anyone in Yorkshire. If she had not actually visited Priory Chase, the family seat of the Rayvens, romantically built among the ruins of an abbey, she had heard enough about it to fire her imagination.
Caves too . . . Alys adored caves, and had several times persuaded the owner of a local one to let her descend into the
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Stygian gloom where, lantern in hand, she would examine the pallid and interesting accretions formed by the slow dripping of water from the roof.
Emerging with a sudden start from her reverie, Alys recollected that both Lady Basset and Sir Walter Scott’s newly published Marmion awaited her at the Hall.
Picking up her pace, she cut through the wilderness past the hermitage, where old Jethro, in a hooded robe, was gloomily seated on a rock whittling something and did not even look up to pass the time of day when she called out a cheerful greeting. It showed a rank ingratitude for the many fresh eggs she had bestowed on him, but she supposed a surly and reclusive nature was a requisite for the position of hermit.
Pursuits
The air seemed to move about Malvina and she could have sworn that the ghost of a kiss lightly touched her lips. Her eyes flew open: the monkish figure stepped back from the moonlight that came through the narrow windows, the dark shadow cast by the cowl of his long robe rendering him eerily faceless.
‘Pray, sir, who – who are you?’ she whispered. ‘And what do you mean by me?’
The Travails
Alys found Lady Basset lying upon her daybed as usual, her exceedingly plump form enveloped in a dashingly diaphanous pink negligée quite unsuited to her figure, languidly eating sugarplums and reading a letter. A glass of brandy, with which she dosed herself against all manner of imaginary ills, stood on a little table at her elbow.
of Lady Malvina by ORLANDO BROWNE
The Book of Lost Stories
She had developed an interestingly delicate constitution as compensation for a life of unrelieved tedium, for Sidlington Hall was isolated and her husband’s interests largely consisted of estate management and hunting. Although rather snubbed by the wives of the half-dozen neighbours within visiting distance, she was good-natured to a fault and always happy to see her stepson’s friends, even though she found them rather serious young men, disinclined to fun and frolic. Her husband’s hunting cronies also voted her a very good sort, for she kept an excellent table and always retired immediately after dinner, leaving them to their carousals.
‘Has Marmion arrived, Aunt?’ Alys asked eagerly, as soon as she had greeted her.
Pug, who had sat up and barked at Alys in a token sort of way, settled back down again next to his mistress and began trying to lick powdered sugar off his snub nose with a triangular pink tongue.
‘Yes, it is there on the table, together with some book about the Lake District which I have no recollection of ordering,’ Lady Basset said, without much interest, for while a thrilling tale filled her with such fearful pleasure that she could resist the enveloping vapours of sleep for quite as much as an hour, poetry with no exciting narrative set her yawning in a trice.
She resumed the reading of her letter, for she maintained a voluminous correspondence with an old friend from her days on the stage who lived a life of much greater interest in London, although, in Alys’s opinion, Lady Crayling’s letters only served to make her aunt the more dissatisfied with her lot.
‘Do you know, Alys, that although Eliza is received in several great houses and married a lord, some of the nobility are still too high in the instep to acknowledge her? Titus Hartwood,
Trisha Ashley
your maternal grandfather, among them,’ she said now. ‘She writes that the widow of his younger brother – and I dare say there were twenty years between them – has gone to live with him in Albemarle Street, together with her daughter, Arabella. William Hartwood married late, so Lavinia Hartwood must be about my age, and her daughter still in the schoolroom. There is a son, too, who Eliza says is exceedingly handsome, besides being his uncle’s heir, but he resides in bachelor lodgings near St James’s Street.’
‘Oh?’ Alys said, looking up from the table where she was eagerly examining the new books. ‘How odd it is to have such close relatives about whom I know nothing, excepting only from hearsay.’
‘I believe your grandfather had a partiality for me at one time, for he would haunt the green room when I was there,’ Lady Basset said complacently, ‘but a greater nipcheese in these affairs there never was, and so several of the girls warned me, so I . . .’
To Alys’s regret, she broke off before she could impart any more interesting insights into her grandfather’s character or, indeed, her own scandalously exciting past.
‘Might I borrow this book about the Lakes, if you do not like it?’ Alys thought that the volume might give her ideas for the background of her novel, which was to be set in the imaginary kingdom of Galbodia at some nebulous time in the mists of antiquity.
‘Yes, do take it . . .’ Lady Basset agreed, once more returning to her letter. She heaved a great sigh, dislodging a sugarplum from the filmy drapery covering her massive bosom.
‘How lucky Eliza is! She goes to routs and masquerades, drives her own carriage in the park and can go shopping