C confronts A and calls him a psychopath.
Of course it’s to “protect” him against “Her”, but still - ick. Then there’s the tit-for-tat drugging - first as students Charles drugs Alonso in his part of their 50-day-free-for-all-use-me-as-a-guinea-pig experiment then 20 years later at Rawblood with A drugging C with morphine. If Charles did, is this how Meg comes to be at Rawblood? Through a pivotal scene we are told that Charles has died and also his sister (Iris’s mother), but we don’t know who dies first. Werewolves? His and Charles’s experiments with heredity and vaccination put all sorts of ideas in your head. At first I thought it was something blood-borne that Alonso was trying to cure. The affliction Iris’s family endures is mysterious. Pay attention, take notes and don’t discount anything as incidental. The story is mostly Iris’s, but we get storylines from her mother, Meg father Alonso Meg’s brother and Alonso’s friend Charles, and finally Alonso’s mother, Mary. The big estate has no servants except for one man called Shakes, but he is hardly adequate and brings nothing to the raising of a girl in the early 20th century. The rules keep her isolated almost entirely - she has no friends and doesn’t attend school. An infamous “She” who kills when a person in the family loves or feels strong emotion. One that caused the deaths of his parents and ancestors going back generations. It is a clandestine friendship because her father, Alonso, has given her rules she must live by in order to stay safe from a hereditary family curse/disease. We start with Iris and her childhood friendship with farmer’s son, Tom. Usually I need more concrete plot and explanations, but with this book I just went with it. There are many instances of foreboding and free-falling into the unknown.
Is it cursed, haunted or is there just madness in the family? Is it from the Italian influence or has it been there all along? Thanks to the family tree, you can see how people are connected, but the anticipation of how exactly they will connect is a nice touch. The story is presented in multiple timelines all centering around the Rawblood estate - once owned by an English family and lost, rescued by Italian, Don Villarca.
Without going into really squidgy detail, Ward adds to your feeling of unease with scenes featuring madhouse conditions circa 1917, vivisection from the 1880s, multiple miscarriages and pasts peppered with all manner of abuse.
If you love rabbit holes that delve into darkness, madness, haunting and the unexplained this is the book for you. Deeply atmospheric, creepy and slightly disjointed in presentation, this is a novel where everything connects.
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