Miss Cheyne of Essilmont, Volume 1

Miss Cheyne of Essilmont, Volume 1

Set in the 1870s among the fox-hunting society of Aldershot and rural Hampshire, this opening volume of James Grant's novel traces the courtship of Alison Cheyne, the impoverished daughter of Sir Ranald Cheyne, baronet of Essilmont, and Captain Bevil Goring of an infantry regiment stationed at Aldershot. The two meet during a run with the Royal Buckhounds at Salthill and are drawn together when Goring reveals that he commanded the firing party at the grave of Alison's brother Ellon, who died in India. He later presents her with a ring taken from Ellon's effects, only to discover, when Alison springs its hidden clasp, that it already contains a lock of her own hair and a miniature of her face — a keepsake Ellon had carried without anyone's knowledge. The coincidence deepens the bond between Alison and Goring, and after a secret meeting in the beech avenue near her home, Chilcote, they become secretly engaged, though Alison insists the attachment must remain hidden from her proud, debt-ridden father. Sir Ranald, obsessed with the vanished glories of his family's Aberdeenshire estate and burdened by unpayable debts, has set his hopes on a wealthy match for Alison with Lord Cadbury, a coarse, elderly, self-made peer who supplies the family with horses, flowers, and other favors while pressing his suit. Alison finds Cadbury repugnant and rebuffs his advances, including his offer of an opal ring, but her father's desperate finances make his wishes hard to resist. Unknown to Sir Ranald, Cadbury secretly buys up all of his outstanding bills from the bill-discounter Solomon Slagg in the City, engineering a financial crisis that will force the baronet's hand. When the pressure lands, Cadbury reveals that he holds the debts and, in a display of apparent generosity calculated to win gratitude rather than love, burns them before Sir Ranald's eyes — on condition that Alison be taken away, ostensibly for her health and diversion, aboard his yacht the Firefly. Father and daughter are hurried out of Chilcote so abruptly that Goring, returning after a period of enforced separation (Sir Ranald having angrily banished him from the house on discovering, if not the engagement itself, at least his daughter's regard for him), finds the house shuttered and up for let, with no word left for him. He is left to search newspaper shipping notices for clues to Alison's whereabouts, tormented by fears that Cadbury's wealth and her father's desperation will eventually break her resistance. Running alongside the main plot is the story of Mrs. Laura Trelawney, a beautiful, enigmatic young widow living near Aldershot with her small daughter Netty, who befriends Alison and becomes entangled with two of Goring's brother officers. Jerry Wilmot, light-hearted and impulsive, proposes to her and is gently but firmly refused; Captain Tony Dalton, a graver man newly returned from long Indian service, is powerfully but mysteriously affected by Mrs. Trelawney, particularly by an old song she sings that seems to touch some buried grief of his own. She hints repeatedly that she already knows a damaging secret from his past and that she herself is not what she seems, deflecting his proposal of marriage while promising that "we have not seen the last of each other yet." Rumors circulate among the officers that she may not truly be a widow at all. A secondary romantic thread follows Jerry Wilmot at his family seat of Wilmothurst, where his aristocratic mother, Lady Julia, looks down on the local attorney's daughter, Bella Chevenix, despite Jerry's growing attachment to her. A visit to arrange estate business delivers a blow to Jerry's pride: he learns that his family's finances are so encumbered that much of the Wilmot property now depends on mortgages held by none other than Bella's father, effectively making Bella, socially disdained by Lady Julia, an heiress far wealthier than the Wilmots themselves — a revelation that leaves Jerry unable to declare his love without seeming mercenary. Woven through the narrative is the Cheyne family's legend of a spectral black hound, said to appear as an omen of death or disaster, which last howled when Alison's mother and brother died. Alison twice believes she glimpses the apparition at moments of crisis — once on the evening she stole out to meet Goring, and again as her father received the news of Cadbury's manipulated debts — lending a note of gothic foreboding to her fate. The volume closes with Alison and her father borne away by Cadbury toward an uncertain destination on the Mediterranean, Goring desperately trying to trace them, and the entangled fortunes of the Trelawney–Dalton and Wilmot–Chevenix pairs still unresolved, setting up the complications to be carried forward into the novel's second volume.

By James Grant · First published 1883 · Genre: Romance, Victorian Novel, Melodrama · 20 chapters · 57,349 words

First lines

'And your name is Alison,' said the young man, looking tenderly in the girl's eyes of soft grey-blue, that long, dark lashes shaded. 'Yet I hear some of your friends call you Lisette.'

'It is, I believe, the same thing -- an old Scoto-French name, long peculiar to our family -- the Cheynes of Essilmont -- as papa would say if he were here,' she added, with a soft smile. Then after a pause she asked, 'How did you learn, Captain Goring, that it was Alison?'

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historical-fiction · romance · Scottish-setting · Victorian-literature · 19th-century-novel · serialized-fiction · female-protagonist · period-drama · social-commentary · family-dynamics · romantic-tension · literary-fiction

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