Beggars can’t be choosers. Neither can women doctors in 1833, apparently. Protagonist Hester Reeves agrees to treat and care for a dying old man so that she can make enough money for her small family to resettle in a nicer part of London. At least, Hester thinks that’s the only task she’s expected to take up for Gervaise Cherville. Within pages of the opening of Lianne Dillsworth’s many-layered House of Shades, Hester is asked to take up a more challenging task than caring for a man with terminal syphilis.
Hester’s skin starts to crawling the minute she sets foot in Tall Trees, the London townhouse of the Cherville family. The housekeeper is an unpleasant woman in the mold of Mrs. Danvers. Gervaise Cherville is an entitled, mercurial invalid. The less said about Rowland Cherville, Gervaise’s heir, the better. But for £10 for a few week’s work, Hester is willing to put up with a lot. She’s no stranger to treating sexually transmitted infections; she previously treated sex workers in her corner of London.
Hester is considerably less experienced with the job Gervaise wants to task her with: find two women who the Chervilles enslaved before the women escaped nearly thirty years prior. Mr. Bright (who recommended Hester for the job), an abolitionist and cleric of some sort, has been working on Gervaise for years to make some kind of atonement for enslaving people on the family’s Caribbean estate. The United Kingdom passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, which freed all enslaved people throughout the British Empire; Bright hopes that Gervaise will make restitution for years of forced labor. Gervaise, however, decides that his atonement will take the form of finding the two women and giving them both large sums of money. Hester, being a Black woman herself, is perfect (so Gervaise decides) to help him find the women without them bolting at the mere sight of him.
House of Shades runs at a faster clip than I expected, given how hard I expected it to be for Hester to track down two women who disappeared decades earlier and who understandably don’t want to be found. There are some moments of luck and revelation that will strain credulity. In spite of the Dickens level coincidences, however, I found myself completely hooked by this story. First, Hester is my kind of protagonist. She’s got a strong sense of ethics, thought she’s pragmatic enough to bend the rules in order to accomplish a greater good. Second, I find it hard to resist a sensationalist plot that includes a spooky house, a malevolent housekeeper, and several closets full of metaphorical skeletons.