jacey | Book Log 47/2016 - Julie Daines: Willowkeep (Reply)

Charlotte Darby is in dire straits. She's run out of money; her mother is dead; her shipping merchant father has vanished presumed dead, and she's the guardian of her much younger special needs sister, a difficult, uncommunicative child prone to massive temper tantrums and uncontrollable behaviour that has made her a target for derision in Hull, where this story begins. Then the unimaginable happens, a young man appears on her doorstep to tell her she's heiress to the prosperous Willowkeep and a vast fortune. So you'd think everything would be all right, yes? Well, no. Though Charlotte is no longer in danger of starving, her good fortune brings its own problems.

Henry Morland is Charlotte's estate steward, an astute young man, impoverished by the need to pay off his father's considerable debts. He's Charlotte's only friend. Her late uncle's widow, resident at Willowkeep, resents Charlotte having the fortune to which she assumed her son (by her first marriage) would inherit. The son has set his cap at the heiress, and there are strange goings on designed to part Charlotte from her fortune. Then she discovers that in order to keep her inheritance she must marry before her twenty-first birthday but she's determined that even if she goes back to a life of poverty, she'll never marry. There are reasons...

I've been reading a lot of Regencyesque romances lately. This one is quite refreshing as it avoids London and the season in favour of staying in the country. Charlotte tries hard, but she doesn't have the polish that the ton expects, and she's also independently minded, having looked after herself since she was in her early teens. Also the challenging sister, possibly autistic, is an unusual and by no means unwelcome character. And then there's the ghost of Anne Boleyn...