The Needfire
Caithness, 1890: Norah makes a demanding journey from Glasgow to beyond Inverness to precipitately marry a man she has never met but only corresponded with. Remote Corrain House ‘clung to the very edge of the point, a squat brown limpet on an iron grey cliff, looking half-minded to jump.’
Norah’s new husband, Alexander Barland, is handsome but taciturn, lacking the warmth of his letters, while Norah thinks of herself as plain. Her alternative to this marriage would have been work as a governess. But this is not to be another Mr Rochester and Jane Eyre tale. An efficient but inscrutable housekeeper, Agnes Gunn, who initially appears to shape up as a Highland Mrs Danvers, turns out to play quite a different role in Norah’s new life. She also owes something to My Cousin Rachel; are the drinks she prepares for Norah truly restorative, or are they the cause of her increasingly alarming hallucinations?
The authors (for MK Hardy is a collaboration) in their social media acknowledge their debt to Daphne du Maurier. Corrain House itself could also give Susan Hill and Eel Marsh House a run for their money: even its carvings seem to be watching the new mistress. Norah can almost hear an ancient rowan tree in the courtyard crying out in pain.
Attempts to shore up the foundations of the house result in a series of accidents. An ancestor who showed scant mercy in clearing crofters from his land glowers from his portrait at Norah. Yes, this story is avowedly Gothic, unashamedly Sapphic and an observation of the futility of trying to control the elements. Only in the last third did it seem as though the authors didn’t quite have control of their material, with subtlety sometimes suffocated by melodrama, though Corrain House’s end is superbly done. I look forward to more from MK Hardy.
