I love Mary Stewart's books, they are such great mysteries to read and she builds up the tension beautifully, I'd like to gradually collect them all (I am such a devil for collecting things!), and I have been looking forward to reading this one.
I love Mary Stewart’s books, they are such great mysteries to read and she builds up the tension beautifully, I’d like to gradually collect them all (I am such a devil for collecting things!), and I have been looking forward to reading this one.
Bryony Ashley (the main character) regularly communicates by thought/mind message with someone who she calls her ‘lover’ but who hasn’t revealed his identity, but as this telepathy is an acknowledged Ashley family trait she thinks it must be one of her cousins (twins Emory and James, or their brother Francis). Bryony is living in Madeira but is summoned, first by a mind message from her ‘lover’ and then by a phone call from her father’s friend, to go to Germany as her father has been knocked down by a hit-and-run driver, but he dies while she is still journeying to him. His final words are fairly incoherent and puzzle the police but were jotted down and seem to refer to Bryony being in danger as well as mentioning a cat and ‘William’s brook’ and a boy, though all this makes little sense to Bryony. Bryony goes to their family home, Ashley Court in England. She senses that her ‘lover’ (the one sending her telepathic messages) is also there at Ashley Court but he still doesn’t reveal his identity to her, however both the twins (Emory and James) are also there at Ashley Court so she wonders again if her ‘lover’ is one of them. Hmmm, I’m finding this telepathy thing rather odd, and I’m not sure quite where we’re going with it, and indeed at the moment why this aspect of the story is here at all. I can see it adds another mystery to the story with the uncertainty over who the person is who is communicating with Bryony, but it just seems an unusual supernatural kind of plot choice. However, perhaps it will become more apparent as the book goes on. I love the personal feel to the telling of the story too, as Bryony is the narrator so it is all written as ‘I’ and this is my favourite style of books as you learn the narrator’s private thoughts and fears and it’s all so enticingly revealing (for such a nosy person as me!).
When Bryony meets Emory, she realises he is actually James and that they often swap identities to help each other out, as they did when they were boys, and they even do this with Emory’s girlfriend who is unaware of the deception. This makes Bryony wonder how dishonest Emory and James may be in other areas of their lives, resulting in her sending a photo of them to her father’s friend in Germany to see if the police there can find anyone who saw them in the area as she thinks they may have killed her father. There are also valuable items missing from Ashley Court, and a church registry is missing from the church. She also meets Rob, her childhood friend who now manages the estate and who constantly reminds Bryony to be wary of her cousins and to regard them as potentially dangerous. Oooh, I love the gothic element of a missing church registry and immediately it makes me think that this is in order to avoid discovery of someone’s right (or their lack of right) to inherit, just as in Wilkie Collins’ wonderful book The Woman in White. But this missing church registry (as it is from the 1800s) reminds me of how I’m also struggling a little with the extra story (written in 1835) which appears at the end of each chapter. This story relates to Nick Ashley and his lover, and yet these stories aren’t mentioned by Bryony (the narrator) so it doesn’t seem that she is reading this story herself and then telling the reader about it. The mystery of why this story appears and its relevance is certainly very intriguing, but I must confess that I’m finding it a little distracting from the main story as I have to keep looking back at these extra bits of story in previous chapters in the hope that things begin to make sense. However, I presume they are related to the missing church registry. And hmmm, I’m beginning to get a little suspicious of Rob and whether his constant warnings that Bryony needs to be careful of her cousins is actually him trying to isolate her from everyone but him, for some sinister and controlling reason, and I also noted that the photo of the twins that Bryony sent to the police also had Rob in the photo so I’m half wondering whether there will be a twist that the police actually recognise Rob as having been in the area rather than the twins!
Wow, and then the end of the book contains plenty of fast-paced action and wraps everything up beautifully, as Bryony finds out that her telepathic ‘lover’ is Rob (which she is delighted about, and they immediately marry), the twins try to murder Bryony and ruin the property as they want to sell the property for redevelopment, and the mystery about Bryony’s father’s final words is explained as he had discovered that Rob was the rightful heir of Ashley Court because he descended from Nick Ashley’s illegitimate child and her father had also realised that Emory and James weren’t to be trusted. Phew, I ended up racing through the latter part of the book because Mary Stewart’s writing is just so gripping that I couldn’t put the book down (and could hardly draw breath!), and I realise this often happens when I read this author’s books so I then immediately have to read the book again in order to get all the details which I missed on my first hurried reading of the book!
There were some wonderfully enticing mysteries running through the story which really gripped my attention, such as what the twins were up to, why the items had been taken from Ashley Court, why the church registry was taken, as well as who the hit-and-run driver was who killed Bryony’s father and the meaning of the puzzling final words spoken by her father, who Bryony’s telepathetic ‘lover’ was, and of course the relevance of the extra stories from 1835! Wow, Stewart certainly treats her readers with lots of glorious mysteries, she is such a wonderful imaginative writer!
There are also some delicious themes running through the book which I really enjoyed, such as the gothic theme (I love those old-fashioned gothic mystery books, in particular those wonderful ones written by Wilkie Collins), the foreboding theme (particularly involving the twins and what they were concealing), the historical theme (with the gloriously old and beautiful Ashley Court, though this was mixed with sadness for me at times because it had become neglected), the nostalgia theme (with Bryony remembering her childhood at Ashley Court), and I liked the contrast too of the themes of closeness and safety that Bryony felt with Rob against the themes of doubt and mistrust and lack of confidence that she felt with her cousins. It’s all so wonderfully and deliciously written!
Admittedly I raced through the latter part of the book due to the adrenaline (!), but I wasn’t sure if the extra bits of story from 1835 were ever fully explained, ie who wrote the story and how it was discovered, as I don’t imagine that Nick Ashley had ever written this story down about himself and left it for someone to find and read, and if he did then who found and read it? And also regarding this extra story at the end of each chapter, as I had said before I had been a little distracted by these as I kept having to flick back to previous ones to remind myself of what they contained, and now the book is concluded I’m still tempted to wonder if they actually needed to be included. Yes, they provided an extra element of intrigue and mystery obviously, but they only really confirmed that Nick Ashley had a child with a local girl who he possibly secretly married and this was local gossip anyway so part of me wonders if the telling of the local gossip would have been adequate?
Before I read anything else, I must re-read this book but a little more slowly and also remembering to breathe! And then of course, there are so many more of her books to choose from and all sound exciting and mysterious, so I think I will perhaps choose my next read of hers from the location where the books are set, as she describes locations so meticulously and this contributes to my delight in reading her books as I can then picture the area and the atmosphere so well in my mind. So Madam Will You Talk is set in Provence (which has always sounded like a lovely place to visit), and Wildfire at Midnight is set on the Isle of Skye (where I have holidayed a few times and is a location I adore). And then (abandoning the location as the deciding factor of my next choice of book!) Thornyhold sounds interesting with another cat link which reminds me of Touch Not The Cat and I wonder if Thornyhold will be anything like Charlotte Bronte’s Thornfield Hall (in Jane Eyre) and the surprises discovered there (!), and I’m also very intrigued by her King Arthur books (the first one being The Crystal Cave) as these sound quite a departure from her usual writing. I was also frequently reminded whilst reading Touch Not The Cat of one of my favourite books, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and I never need an excuse to re-read that classic so I will have to treat myself to that. I have also been enjoying reading Charles Palliser’s wonderfully huge book The Quincunx at the same time as reading Touch Not The Cat, which also has hints of a missing church registry and concealment of rightful inheritance so I liked the similarity to these subjects. I also loved the mention of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey within Touch Not The Cat, which has reminded me that I am long overdue a re-read of this great book with all its literary references (though often referenced sarcastically by Austen!).
