The Castle Keepers
The castle: Leedswick Castle in Northbridge, England, a fortress with crumbling stones and overgrown gardens in 1870, paint-chipped walls and dusty windows in 1917, and a haunting battlefield painting in 1945.
The keepers: Beatrice Holbrook, new wife of Charles Alnwick; artist Elena Hamilton commissioned to create a lifelike face mask to hide Tobias Alnwick’s WWI wounds; psychoanalyst Brigitta Mayr working with Alec Alnwick to transform the castle into a rehabilitation center for WWII veterans.
Three time periods. Three sets of characters. Three separate writers.
Yet The Castle Keepers weaves a unifying tale of love and war, the lingering aftereffects of murder and scandal on a family’s legacy, the pressures of maintaining a sprawling estate, and the determination to remove a curse that was wrongly cast upon the castle and its keepers.
The story features strong female characters in relationships beset by external conflict as well as intimate emotional struggles. It shifts smoothly across time, depicting the confining culture and class-consciousness women faced in the late 1800s, the lingering and uncomfortable attitudes toward women pursuing a profession in the early 1900s, and a growing appreciation of women as professional as well as personal partners in the 1940s.
