Summary
In a crumbling Georgian manor where dust motes perform slow-motion pirouettes across sunbeams, widowed arachnologist Margaret Winton—ink still wet on her husband’s death certificate—accepts a bizarre commission: to ghost-write Lord Anthony Crackenthorpe’s obsessive monograph on the erotic architecture of spider courtship. She arrives with Peggy, her minx-like offspring whose eyes flicker like struck matches, a girl raised on museum corridors and the taste of formaldehyde. The estate’s corridors breathe with the ghosts of baroque debutantes; ancestral portraits blink when no one watches. Anthony, a man whose pulse quickens only for eight-legged silk-weavers, finds himself ambushed by desire for the erudite widow, while his dynastically anxious mother—part Medea, part matchmaker—dispatches feckless younger son Jimmy to inoculate the family line against mesalliance. Peggy, overhearing her mother’s self-sacrificing refusal of Anthony’s trembling proposal, orchestrates a coup de théâtre: a forged marriage announcement, a moonlit infiltration of Jimmy’s London flat, and a scandal that ricochets from drawing room to tabloid like a bullet in a ballroom. The film’s final reel is a fugue of slammed doors, hastily procured special licenses, and the dawning terror that improvisation may be the only form of honesty left.
Synopsis
Lord Anthony Crackenthorpe engages the help of a zoologist's widow to help him write a book about his favorite subject, spiders. She moves into his mansion with her impetuous daughter Peggy ( Marguerite Clark ). Anthony's mother is very worried that her son, heir to the Crackenthorpe estate may become involved with Peggy. She asks her younger son Jimmy ( Jack Mulhall ) to keep company with the young girl. However, Anthony has already fallen in love with Peggy's mother and the girl learns her mother has turned down his marriage proposal, insisting she will not marry until her daughter has wed. Upon hearing this, Peggy leaves a note claiming she has married Jimmy and sneaks herself into his home while he is gone. Jimmy's mother is livid and fears her son may be ruined by scandal. Now the always impulsive Peggy suddenly decides she really does love Jimmy and they now must marry immediately.
