Summary
A sylvan manor becomes a crucible of retribution when Lady Winifred, silk-clad and trembling beneath corseted propriety, slips through moon-mist to plight troth with Michael Wain, the estate’s taciturn gamekeeper whose hands know the hush of pheasant wings and the heft of a poacher’s trap. Their clandestine vows—whispered inside a crumbling hermitage where ivy strangles stone—are discovered by Lord Altcar, a sybaritic earl who has already pawned the family silver and now stakes his final ace: his daughter’s womb. To cancel gambling debts to the serpentine Lord Burford, Altcar sanctions a medieval punishment: Wain is thrashed until the river runs garnet, then flung like refuse beyond the horizon. Years ferment into venom. Wain re-emerges, fortune amassed in Argentine beef and Yukon dust, clutching parchment mortgages that girdle the Altcar acres. Foreclosure looms like a gibbet until a letter—ink the color of dried blood—reveals that Winifred’s child, Dora, reared by Alpine nuns on echoing hymns and candle smoke, is betrothed to John Gillespie, a Pennsylvania painter who limns glaciers and girls with equal rapture. Burford, still hungry for the Altcar bloodline, now covets the daughter’s hand, orchestrating a tableau worthy of Sodom: a bare model posed beneath Dora’s portrait, scandal ignited, virtue incinerated. The girl flees to glacial cloisters; her repentant father trudges through drifts of guilt; Wain, love and vengeance knotted in his chest, gallops after. On a precipice where abyssal winds flay the soul, pursuers converge: Burford’s hirelings, Gillespie’s brush-worn fingers, Wain’s ledger of wrongs, Winifred’s lacerated heart. Snow obliterates the trail, yet in that white erasure every debt is re-written in the red of shared breath.
Synopsis
Hearts are trumps when Lady Winifred secretly marries gamekeeper Michael Wain. The discovery of marriage by her father Lord Altcar, who is bent on trading his daughter to Lord Burford in order to cover his losses at cards, causes Altcar to have Wain horribly beaten and dismissed with a warning never to return. Years later when Wain returns, embittered and bent upon revenge, he buys up the mortgages on Altcar manor and is arranging for foreclosure when he learns an astounding fact: Lady Winifred's convent-raised daughter Dora is engaged to American artist John Gillespie, but her hand is sought by the same Lord Burford who sought that of her mother. Conspiring to destroy Dora's love for John, Burford attempts to disgrace the girl by having a nude body attached to the portrait that Gillespie painted of her. Shamed and brokenhearted, Dora runs away to the convent in the Alps, causing her father to accept his paternal responsibility and reconcile himself with Lady Winifred. Burford, having discovered Dora's destination, attempts to have her abducted, but her lover, father and mother follow in pursuit and, after many tribulations, the four are reunited during a blinding snowstorm.
