House of Shades
London 1833. Hester Reeves is employed as a nurse/healer to Gervaise Cherville, old, frail and ill. He is head of his rich family at his London house, Tall Trees, which is a forbidding, neglected property. Hester is of Afro-Caribbean ethnicity, and she soon discovers that the Cherville family wealth derived from former plantation and slavery ownership in Honduras. Gervaise Cherville appears to be suffering from guilt for his slave-owning past and asks Hester to track down two female slaves that previously worked in Tall Trees so that he can make some form of reparation by retrospectively paying them for their labour, thereby assuaging his guilt. Hester uncovers all sorts of secrets in her quest and inadvertently sets in train a series of profound events.
The style is fairly formulaic gothic: the young, friendly servant and the hostile housekeeper, as well as the dangerous and sinister son Rowland Cherville, who has lewd designs upon Hester’s younger sister, whom Hester made a deathbed promise to their mother to protect. The story is rather routine, although the plot is well told and proceeds agreeably with a few unexpected twists and turns. The issue of slavery, guilt, reparation and atonement is very much the essence of the narrative. The historical context is quite light and lacking credibility at times, and the dialogue is not very period in terms of what the characters say and how they say it. Moreover, without giving away any of the denouement, the ending involves a technically highly implausible event that seems to play fast and loose with elementary physics.
