The Master of Black Tower by Barbara Michaels
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
*This is a #TBRChallenge review, there will be spoilers, I don't spoil everything but enough, because I treat these reviews as a bookclub discussion.
He walked like Satan through the wrath of heaven, with a long, free stride and arrogantly poised head; and I wondered how many years it would take to wipe that picture of him out of my mind.
Y'all. I don't know. The theme for this month's TBRChallenge was Spooky/Gothic and while you could say this had some vibes of those characteristics, I'm going with UNHINGED for our word of the day. The pace and vibes were all over the place and just the general way the author wrote the characters and their actions? My modern self can only think of UNHINGED.
In first person pov (my preferred pov in Gothics), readers are introduced to our heroine Damaris as she's at her father's funeral. It's 1853 and since her and her scholar father lived a bit hermit, there's really no one to turn to for eighteen year old Damaris. Her father didn't leave her quite enough to be independent and everyone is just expecting her to marry her father's heir and her cousin, Randall. Damaris does not like Randall, though. I have to say, my mind went places over how she thought about Randall but it's more that she just doesn't like him. Our “boldness of character” (Horrors!) Damaris was her father's secretary for years and so she sends out letters trying to find a job with some of her father's associates. I'm sure you can imagine how that goes and Darmaris has to slap some faces before she decides to go to one more interview, Mr. Gavin Hamilton, Master of Blacktower.
Like any good master of a tower in a Gothic, Gavin is scarred, Across one side of his face, from brow to chin, ran a livid scar that puckered his flesh and distorted the shape of his mouth. Damaris is disturbed at first, but remember, boldness of character! And not wanting to marry cousin Randall, has her accepting the job to catalog and arrange his library in Scotland. Gavin mentions that a chaperon, an older, probably should go to a doctor for narcolepsy, lady will be there, along with his daughter, Annabelle. Gavin has this to say about his daughter:
“The young lady is my daughter. She is an invalid, unable to walk. Because of her handicap she has been badly spoiled. She seems even younger than her sixteen years.”
AND
The girl hasn’t the brains of a gnat, and her character is no more pleasing. I was only trying to warn you what you can expect from the little idiot. Personally, I advise you to avoid her. I do.”
Seems a bit harsh???
Damaris arrives at Gavin's home by the Cairngorm Mountains and we get some rainy, desolate Gothic vibes. Damaris notices that Gavin always wears these black silk gloves (spooooky), the help seems scraggly, there's an Angus who is around to be creepy, Annabelle and her maid are a-holes, and they "only use the west wing” of the house. If you're like me, you just yelled out that the wife who birthed the daughter Gavin is such a fan of and has not been mentioned, is in that east wing being crazy.
You have to wait and see!
Damaris, sort of, gets around to righting his library but mostly it seems that they go horse riding most days. There's some back and forth between the two that we get to “see” and for the most part Gavin is that his bark is worse than his bite hero character and he's more teasing under currents toward her. It was disappointing that we didn't get to see these two together as much as I wanted but that publishing date of 1966 is a killer. When they do have a moment of kissing, it's like the author wrote the words, finished the book, and then right before publishing, the kissing scenes got deleted. The scenes read as if the words were snatched right out, all left up to readers getting the context and having to imagining it happening. Anyway, there's a lightening storm that causes feelings to get heightened between Damaris and Gavin while they're fighting, a kiss (I'm 99.99% sure it happened!), and then Damaris is saying she loves Gavin. Readers have maybe seen them together four times (under ten at least!) at this point.
Some of the unhinged comes from when Damaris meets the daughter and Annabelle acts like she can't leave the bed, every character Damaris talks to has a different opinion to how the daughter lost her ability to walk. The different stories also come flooding in when Damaris asks about Gavin's wife, pleurisy! childbirth! drowned! murdered! Every time reader's think they know, it's some other wild story that doesn't even seem necessary to add getting thrown out there.
I forgot to say Davey the minstrel is also in the house. No, he's not really intricate to the story, but he's there!
Gavin ends up leaving to go to Edinburgh for a while (to do Master things???) and Damaris is a girl after my own heart and gets to snooping. Disappointingly she doesn't really find anything other than Gavin needs an interior designer for a woman's touch.
Davey the minstrel dies.
A brother and sister, Sir Andrew and Lady Mary, decide to let a house in the neighborhood and start slinking around. Andrew makes a move on Damaris thinking she's Gavin's mistress, there's some slapping and then it becomes glaring apparent that he's after Annabelle but 18 yr old Damaris is 18 yr old-ing and above her head it goes. She's still wrapped up in loving Gavin but thinking he wants nothing to do with her, especially when Lady Mary comes into the picture because he seems captivated by her. Along with readers probably working out that Andrew wants the daughter, it's pretty obvious that Gavin likes Damaris but feels too old and scarred for her, he shows some jealously when Andrew is in the picture.
Damaris walks in on the daughter trying to walk(?????). I guess Annabelle was never examined by a doctor and just has been laying in her bed for 14ish years(??????). Damaris feels like she should tell Gavin but shrugs it off because meh, no one likes the girl anyway. Unhinged
Andrew wants to marry Annabelle! Damaris is Shocked! Gavin says NO. Damaris receives a note slid under her door: “I must talk to you tonight,” it began, without greeting. “But not in the house. Come to the Black Tower at once.”
She automatically assumes it's from Gavin and gallivants off to the isolated, crumbling, old tower. Unhinged. Gothic par for the course.
I'm sure this will shock all of you, but Damaris gets scared by someone there and as she's hanging, dangling over a ledge, she's grasping someone's wrist but they don't help and she falls. She ends up knocked out but waking up and managing to crawl in the dark and rain most the way back until she's discovered. She spends ten-ish days in bed with a fever. One of the biggest complaints I have about this book is how days are just skipped, the passage of time felt out of wack and ruined some of the story flow for me.
We get the term “idiot content”.
Half a star added to rating
Damaris learns a reason to not fear Gavin when he reveals why he wears the black silk gloves, even though she was totally at least 65% sure he wasn't out to murder her. She adds stalking to snooping and catches Gavin and Lady Mary having a heated moment but before she can get more answers, cousin Randall arrives!
They were almost of a height, although Randall was broader and thicker than the Master. The latter was dressed in his usual costume, kilt and hose, and jacket over a not too clean white shirt. He wore no cravat; his collar was open; and his hair was wet. If a stranger had been asked to decide which of the two was the heir to a great peerage, he would never have chosen Mr. Hamilton.
The hero doesn't physically measure up to the challenger?!? Unhinged!
Damaris seems to get some concrete information on the wife, she was lower class, Gavin married her against the wishes of his family, and it seems she started to make his life miserable when they didn't live as lavish as she thought they would. Does Damaris get this info from Gavin? Ahahahhhahhha, no. Creepy Angus.
With Randall in the picture, Gavin gets more activated and we finally get some scenes of them together, with moments: I was crying by then, but they were tears of rage, and when he pulled me into his arms I tried to bite him.
And
His arms tightened. “Randall can’t have you. You belong to me. How do you like that, you fiery feminist?”
Fiery Feminist.
Half a star added to rating
Andrew and Lady Mary are holding a ball!
Gavin tries to get Damaris to agree to leave right after the ball. She thinks he doesn't love her and wants to foist her off on Randall. They're finally about to actually talk it out on a balcony at the ball when the stable hand Ian comes crawling out of the woods and tells them that Andrew has taken Annabelle and they're off to elope. It's all over within a few pages, because there's nothing this story likes to do more than skip right over events, and Annabelle shows why her dad speaks of her the way he does. Seriously, having a kid so unlikable and a parent who so blatantly doesn't like her, Damaris says some pretty dismissive stuff about her too, feels wild because modern publishing seems like it would never. Unhinged
The elopement attempt might be over but the action isn't! The story really rushes from this point. We get a sword fight! Lamenting and moaning from Gavin when he didn't kill, only wounded, someone, and Damaris forced to leave. But Gavin seems to have some sort of plan, he alluded to it at the ball, and he sends Annabelle, Randall, Ian, a maid, and the narcolepsy lady with Damaris to Edinburgh. He also gives Damaris a package that he makes her promise to give to his lawyer in Edinburgh.
They travel six hours before Damaris, is like, naw. And decides to leave, without telling anyone, IN A SNOW STORM (unhinged), that she is going back to Gavin. Ian catches up to her and they have a harrowing trip back, a horse dies, Ian severely hurts knee, they find shelter close to Gavin's home. Damaris sleeps a bit but then wakes up in the middle of the night and decides, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. She leaves in the dark snowy storm and climbs up an icy rocky cliff(?????) and then passes out as a shadowy form is coming toward her.
She wakes to Gavin and they're hold up in the dungeon/basement of the crumbling tower. We get a declaration of love and finally get some, unhinged, answers
SPOILERS
Lady Mary is Gavin's wife (it can't always be the east wing!) and Andrew is her lover. With Gavin being the heir to his old ailing brother, Lady Mary set up a plan to get Andrew to marry Annabelle (wedding your daughter to your lover, unhinged) and then have hired assassins (they were 'guests' at the ball) kill Gavin. Side killing Damaris has also been in the works
END SPOILERS
Now that Damaris (and readers) know the score, Gavin and Damaris are on the run from assassins. Unhinged because to get to this point from where we started??
Creepy Angus pops up and we get an, unhinged feeling explanation that he was creepy because he thought he was the bastard son of Gavin's grandfather(????).
Gavin has a life and death fight with a dog, a horse saves them, and people fall off a cliff. The end.
I'm not exaggerating, I only thought I'd read abrupt endings before. Unhinged.
