Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Posts Tagged ‘19th-century New Hampshire’

Lucy Blunt is a convicted murderess, but she’s innocent.  At least that’s what she tells us.  In her own words, “Truth is a rather pliable object, isn’t it?  Something molded and recreated and told as an entertaining story.”

Lucy (is that even her real name?) is a prisoner in a New Hampshire jail when the novel opens.  She takes the reader through her life, detailing the events that led her to the Burton mansion and its eccentric, if not threatening, occupants.

Lucy’s voice is the only one we hear in the novel, but is it a reliable one?  She grew up in a loving home with her parents and brother, but all that changed when her mother and brother died from whooping cough.  The double tragedy drove her father to drink and Lucy to have an affair with a married man.  That affair ended in disaster when their infant son, unacknowledged by his father, died and Lucy’s father forced her out of the house.  It was the beginning of a downward spiral for her.

She’s had several menial jobs and is now desperate to find a better place for herself.  Mary Dawson, the young woman whose job with the Burtons she wants, had been found drowned in a nearby icy brook, and Lucy loses no time in forging references in order to join that household as a “washer-up,” what today we would call a kitchen maid.

Besides the staff, the mansion houses the three Burtons–Mr. Burton, owner of the town’s mill; his wife, Eugenie; and Mr. Burton’s cousin, Rebecca, companion to his wife.  Eugenie is a recluse who stays upstairs behind a locked door by choice and, as Lucy discovers a few days after she’s employed, is blind.

There’s a strange dynamic among the family, with the husband rarely home but overly solicitous of his wife when he is, the demanding yet secretive wife, and the companion who appears to have taken an unreasonable dislike to Lucy.

Then Rebecca contracts typhoid, and there’s no choice but to allow Lucy to become Mrs. Burton’s temporary companion.  And then she becomes more than that.

The Companion is spellbinding.  The reader empathizes with Lucy, is angered by her poor choices, and is hoping with her for a commutation of her death sentence–death by hanging in the New Hampshire State Prison at 10:15.  The winter weather, with its ice and snow, deepens the misery that surrounds everyone in the story.  It’s as if their hearts, including Lucy’s, are as frozen as the weather.

Kim Taylor Blakemore has written an outstanding mystery.  Her prose is perfectly suited to the mid-century time period of the novel, and our feelings for Lucy go back and forth between sympathy and its opposite, or at least mine did.  It’s a bravura performance.

You can read more about Kim Taylor Blakemore at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.