Time travel, Victorian melodrama or Gothic horror – it would be difficult to categorise Darkwater Hall by Catherine Fisher
as all three genres are interlaced in this story of lost inheritance and payback.
Set at the end of the 19th century in a Cornish coastal village, Sarah Trevelyan and her dispossessed
father live with Martha, a former servant, in her rundown cottage. Whilst Sarah is forever grateful for such kindness, her father bemoans his lost inheritance, sacrificed by his own father fifteen years earlier.
Sarah earns a pittance working as a pupil teacher under schoolmistress Mrs. Hubbard. She accepts frequent humiliation from the cruel Mrs. Hubbard for the small wage she earns and the access she is allowed to the school’s few books. But one day the castigation is too much for her to bear. Unable to watch Mrs. Hubbard inflict the cane upon Emmeline Rowney, Sarah challenges the bullying teacher and accepts Emmeline’s punishment in her place, after which she tells Mrs. Hubbard that she can ‘keep her situation.’ The mysterious Lord Azrael, owner of Darkwater Hall, the Trevelyan family
home lost in a gambling wager who is visiting the school with a group of village ‘worthies’, observes the whole scene.
Now without a job, Sarah fears she will no longer be able to pay for herself and her father to lodge with Martha, but then Azrael offers her a job, cataloguing the books in the library at her old home.
Sarah returns to the house she hardly remembers and learns a little of her ancestry. The Trevelyans were harsh landlords, unbending employers, hardly one of the benevolent philanthropist families of Victorian history. But Sarah wants her home back and also to atone for the sins of her forefathers. She is prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice and sells her soul to Azrael for the return of her home and fortune. He agrees and says he will return in 100 years to claim his payment.
The second part of the book introduces us to Tom whose mother cleans at Darkwater Hall, now an exclusive, private school. Tom has his own modern demon to vanquish, and a battle ensues between good and evil and past and present, but things are not always what they seem.
The transition from the Victorian era to the late 20th century is successfully achieved by a series of references – Emmeline Downey is Tom’s great-grandmother while Tom and his mother live in a renovated property called Martha’s Cottage. Other characters cross the time chasm with believable ease.
This is a story of alchemy, fallen angels and a great work. Set against a backdrop of the mystical Cornish coastline, this novel for older, more accomplished readers features magical imagery and finely drawn characters whose fates are only revealed in the very last pages.