In late Victorian England, the Torrington family’s stately home of Sterne is under threat from the creditors. Edward Swift, who has married the widow Charlotte, is off to Manchester for the weekend to secure a new loan, leaving behind Charlotte and three stepchildren – Clovis, Emerald and young Imogen. It is unfortunate timing; he will miss Emerald’s eighteenth birthday dinner.
Only a couple of guests are invited, Emerald’s childhood friend, Patience Sutton and her mother. But circumstances intervene and Patience’s brother, Earnest, turns up instead of the mother; and when nouveau riche neighbour John Buchanan calls with a present, he gets added to the guest list too. Dealing with the revised catering falls to housekeeper Florence Trieves, aided by one maid.
When Clovis goes to collect the Suttons from the station, he returns with startling news. There has been a dreadful accident on the branch line and passengers are in need of somewhere to shelter until the railway can make arrangements for their journey to continue. They have been directed to Sterne.
When they turn up, they are a raggle-taggle bunch from the third class carriage, plus one gentleman from first who goes by the name Charlie Traversham-Beecham. While the rabble are herded into the morning room to be plied with cups of tea, the gentleman (and a very forward one too) is invited to the perpetually disrupted birthday dinner.
The evening gradually descends into confusion, chaos and madness. The rabble seem to multiply, Traversham-Beecham exerts a malevolent control over proceedings, a storm breaks, past truths emerge, and suppressed opinions are aired. Will relationships and guests, invited and otherwise, survive the stormy night?
The narrative and characters draw the reader
in and forward quickly; the slide from normality through strangeness into the
supernatural is gradual and well handled, so by the end, the events of the
weekend, as explained to the returning Edward Swift, seem perfectly natural.
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