It’s 1796, and an idealistic young English doctor, Duval Harlington, just released from La Force prison in revolutionary Paris, learns that his father is dead. He is now Lord Harlington, heir to a fortune and the idyllic estate of Muchmore. But in order to gain possession of his heritage – and, as importantly, foil the aspirations of his unpleasant cousin Ralph Carson – Duval must marry within two days and seven hours. No suitable partner is available, so he buys a woman in a Norfolk wife sale for ten guineas.
Money, its acquisition and loss, is woven through this hugely enjoyable novel. The French refugees trying to make their way in Georgian England are very different to those in The Scarlet Pimpernel, and one character is saved from death in a freezing, damp, broken-down cottage only by the liberal application of lucre. Duval’s country estate is not valued simply as a birthright, but because ‘in prison, the memory of Muchmore’s tranquillity had kept him alive… an oasis from the outside world’. What is described is the kind of healing, enchanted space all damaged people dream of, and tend to find only in fiction.
It is not only Duval who needs healing. His new wife, Edmée, is French, the widow of a brutish, drunken parson; and once her bruised face has healed, she turns out to be a woman of refinement, beauty and mystery. The gentlemanly Duval expects to be able to give them both their freedom after the wedding ceremony, but there is a codicil to his father’s will: within a year, the new Lord and Lady Harlington must be in love. The wicked Carson will stop at nothing to prevent this happening, and when Duval and Edmée do indeed become lovers, she promptly vanishes. Our hero must go in pursuit of his wife, discovering both her secrets and that of a priceless jewel lost in the Terror.
All this is fun, but what lifts The Bride Stone above the level of pure entertainment is the author’s engagement with her characters. Duval left home ‘as a young man, with a head full of dreams’ and returned ‘ancient, with a head full of nightmares’. Edmée has suffered rape and torture; she is seriously ill after Duval buys her, and it transpires that this was not the first time she had been sold or abused. The novel owes as much to the fury at injustice of A Tale of Two Cities as it does to Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades.
A Carnegie and Costa-winning author of children’s fiction such as I, Coriander, The Red Necklace and Maggot Moon, Sally Gardner is one of those rare authors, like Joan Aiken and Eva Ibbotson, who can write equally well for adults and children. The tropes of the genre are infused with wit, imagination and maturity. Where her previous adult novels, such as The Weather Woman, needed better editing and less magic, The Bride Stone is leaner and more propulsive. Each chapter is short and absorbing, much like a first-rate children’s novel but with indirect intimations of sex. The book abounds with vivid minor characters, from the detective (or Bow Street officer) Mr Quinn searching for Edmée to Duval’s wise, motherly aunt and the viciously snobbish Carson.
We all crave escapism at present, and it is surely no coincidence that the two best entertainments this summer – Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s The Art of a Lie being the other – are both set in the turbulent 18th century. Just be warned. I stayed up very late to finish this book.
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