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1800s: What lies behind the facades of those respectable houses in Bath?
The Misbegotten
What you need to know before your trail
Rachel Crofton is a governess but an unhappy one and so when she marries a charming self-made businessman, she sees it as a way out and the chance of a better life.
It is not long before she is asked to be the companion of friends of her husband – and especially to a man called Jonathan Alleyn who is both reclusive and tortured in many ways due to the war. He is also harbouring harrowing memories of the how his childhood sweetheart Alice simply disappeared.
Starling meanwhile is a servant in the Alleyn family. She knew Alice years algo and loved her as a sister. she believes something else happened to alice and that jonahan is to blame.
Whatever the truth is, she is determined to get to it.
Rachel is also finding her experiences in the Alleyn household disturbing and she is also keen to find out what really is going on in that dark strange house. She finds the atmosphere at home repressive too and so she becomes even further entwined in the Alleyn’s world
Travel Guide
Bath
There is some shocking and unsettling behind Bath’s immaculate facades. And the curtains are twitching….”The city was a tangled mess….” it is said and this is where the reclusive Jonathan Alleyn lives.
“The kitchen of the house on Landsdown Crescent , in Bath, had a vaulted ceiling and tall windows to compensate for being below street level.”
This and other houses are hiding deep dark secrets….Jonathan Alleyn for one with his black mood and his pain etched in his face and evident in his angry outbursts. Rachel is also determined to find out more about the past. She wanders the streets as she explores them, as if searching for the truth in the walls –
“Since her retreat from Milsom Street, she had taken to explore the narrower streets behind and between, where the backs of buildings piled on top of one another as they marched and down the city’s steep hills”
The marshlands
“The day the child walked in from the march was one of deadening cold”. This is a cold, bleak and desolate area. One which no one should be, least of all a child. And the landscape evokes the cold,dark future of anyone found here. The girl when she comes is bedraggled and alone, windswept just like the marshlands themselves.
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