The Original

A Novel

Nell Stevens

This yummy Gothic novel uses the 19th-century Tichborne case (the return of a beloved son presumed lost at sea) as invisible scaffolding to tell a gripping story of identity, class, the desire to belong, the ache for love, and the power of art.

It’s 1899. Our heroine and narrator is 12-year-old Grace — an odd sort of orphan who is fiesty and misunderstood. Think Jane Eyre if she’d listened to music by The Clash. Both of her parents have been committed to a mental hospital, and she’s been reluctantly taken in by her aunt (cold and judgmental) and her uncle (an uncultured oaf).

The Gothic atmosphere is pleasantly thick, but Grace brings a mischievousness to the proceedings:

At my parents’ house, I had spoken to everyone in the same manner: my parents the same as the vicar the same as the maid the same as the rag-and-bone men… I was taught no rules in this regard except the rule of being a pleasant person who did not trouble others and who was untroubled by them. I had not known, before I moved to Inderwick Hall, that to see the family lawyer emerge from a consultation with my aunt and say, ‘Why are you so sweaty? Have you been running or are you sick?’ would be considered an affront.’

The young girl’s only ally is her cousin Charles, five years her senior. He’s a charmer and a bit of a rascal. Exhibit A: He pays the chamber maids to pose nude for paintings (and also distracts himself in church by reading pornography). But his approach to Grace is marked by warmth and a generosity of spirit; he even teaches her to paint.

Much like Brontë’s heroine, Grace is considered too odd and too troublesome to be loved by her adoptive parents. And to be fair, she is unlike them — or anyone else, really. She has face blindness, which means until she’s very well acquainted with a person, she’s never quite sure if she’s seen them before. And paradoxically, she’s a supremely gifted forger of paintings, able to recreate the colors, stroke style, and composition of the great masters.

Charles and Grace become co-conspirators to survive their time at Inderwick Hall. Until one fateful day, after a vicious fight with his father, Charles runs away to the sea. At first, letters arrive with tales of adventure, but then — nothing. It’s presumed he’s drowned in the Mediterranean. Then 12 years later, a man presents himself at the Hall, claiming to be Charles. The plot does thicken.

As a reader, you know all of that by chapter two. The rest of the book leaps backward and forward in time, revealing more about Grace and Charles — and circling the question of whether this New Charles is the real Charles or not.

This book is Romantic with a capital R, bursting with lush, swoony feelings and people acting on intuition rather than reason. There’s a family curse and daring escapes and forbidden love and heartbreaking twists that feel good in that bad way. (Or is it bad in that good way?) Grace’s emotional descriptions of famous paintings by van Eyck, Velázquez, and Coubert are so vivid, you’ll feel as if you’ve stepped into their frames.

This is a book to sweep you away, and its triumphant conclusion is as inevitable as the daily tides.

And then we arrived, at last, at Inderwick Hall. The driveway was long and straight as an arrow from the gatehouse to the Hall, and the lower branches of the yew trees lining the way were bare, so we could see the house several minutes before we reached it, growing, looming, the ivy around the sides of the wings first just a haze, and then a rippling green, and then, finally, I could smell the thick earthiness of it and hear the wind lacing through the vines, rain tapping the leaves, the door at the main entrance rattling ajar as though the house was breaking open, a broadening crack. The carriage stopped; the horses ground their hooves into the gravel. I always felt a churning unease on seeing the front aspect of the building, the way it seemed to tilt forwards at you, casting a shadow that was too dark and too long… The sight reminded me, inescapably, of my first arrival, when I had been alone and my parents gone. I had allowed myself on the journey to imagine my uncle’s house as a castle, something from children’s stories, where everything would be gleaming and people would be pleased to see me. It had been sunny that day, spring, and the Oxfordshire lanes had been blossoming and noisy with birds and I had somehow not noticed the mud, the cows wading knee deep through floodwater, the unchanging palette of brown and green and brown, which not even the hawthorn blossom and cow parsley could disrupt. The gatehouse. The yew trees. I had imagined my uncle and aunt, hearing the sounds of the wheels on the driveway, would rush down to meet me, to say how tired I must be, and how hungry, that there was tea waiting, and cake… It took me years to understand it was not the house itself that was hostile… It was only the family: my uncle and aunt… — Nell Stevens

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