Summary
On a fog-laced Cotswold morning, Alice—feral grin, ankles itching for velocity—spins through baroque corridors like a Catherine wheel, her uncle’s swollen toes crystallizing into the very shackles she means to shatter. A single thunderous prank—pheasants loosed in the study, ink in the claret—bludgeons the gouty patriarch into exile; the mansion exhales, its windows yawning open upon a kingdom of self-invention. She lacquers her identity with a maid’s apron, coaxes the staff into masquerading diplomats and duchesses, and waylays Richard Compton, a lionized novelist whose sentences are longer than his patience, persuading him that the marble mausoleum is now a bohemian guesthouse. Furniture is re-christened, ghosts are rented out as boarders, and for one incandescent dusk the manor becomes a Pirandello diorama—until the uncle’s cane raps back across the gravel, bursting the illusion like a soap bubble. Months later, under chandeliers dripping with hunt-ball candlewax, Alice pirouettes in silk, her heartbeat syncopated to the quadrille; Richard, still bemused, circles her orbit while Galloping Dick—top-hat highwayman, burglar laureate—threads the ballroom pockets for a diamond rivière worthy of a tsarina. Midnight yelps; jewels vanish; suspicions ricochet. Alice, convinced her beloved litterateur moonlights as a jewel magpie, bundles him into the wine cellar where they collide with Dick’s lantern-jawed accomplice. In the mercurial torchlight, identities melt like tallow: heiress, author, thief, audience. Handcuffs click, accusations detonate, yet the true larcenists are unmasked in a finale that pirouettes from farce to fugue, leaving reputations re-stitched and hearts freshly pickpocketed.
Synopsis
Alice, an energetic vixen, lives in a country estate with her gouty uncle, who denies her any companions. She plagues him with pranks until he leaves the estate. Now free to seek adventure, she dresses as a maid and convinces a passer-by, Richard Comstock, a celebrated author, that the estate is a boardinghouse. She has the servants pose as distinguished guests. The uncle returns and spoils the spoof. Later she meets Richard at the hunt club ball, which Galloping Dick, a gentleman burglar, also attends, in a strictly professional capacity. When jewels are discovered missing, Alice, thinking Richard is the thief, hides him in the cellar, where they run into Galloping Dick's accomplice. Alice and Richard are at first denounced as thieves, but the actual culprits are apprehended.
