Summary
A transatlantic heiress, Leslie MacLeod, purchases the crumbling Scottish pile of her forebears, its stone arteries still echoing with Jacobite heartbeats; she strides through the fog in jodhpurs and defiance, a torch-carrying New-World woman amid moss-covered dynasties. Two masculine constellations orbit her: Glenayr, the diffident laird whose bloodline is older than the peat, all velvet restraint and glances that taste of heather; and Lanzana, a Spanish blackguard exiled by his own court, a man who wears ambition like a scarlet lining beneath a sombre cape. Lanzana’s bargain with Madrid is simple—retrieve the Armada’s sunken reliquary of emeralds the size of quails’ eggs and the Habsburgs will solder a ducal coronet to his skull. Leslie’s refusal to become his passport to legitimacy detonates a chemical revenge: a crystal of laudanum slipped into Venetian glass, a toast to bruised male pride. But the New-World woman has the Old-World guile of her grandmothers; she transposes the goblets, watches the Spaniard’s pupils dilate into black suns, and lifts the parchment of his obsession while he collapses like a marionette with severed strings. What follows is a sub-aquatic gothic: a prototype bathysphere—riveted iron, quartz portholes, brass dials that click like anxious teeth—lowered into the Atlantic abyss where galleon ribs jut from sand the colour of bone-ash. Glenayr descends, candle-flames of determination guttering inside his copper helmet, only to find Lanzana resurrected and waiting, knife between teeth, eyes reflecting the green gold that has already turned his soul to verdigris. In the cathedral of kelp they wrestle, breaths measured in cubic inches of air, until the ocean claims the villain and the laird surfaces with the casket, water streaming off him like liquid night. Back on the basalt cliffs Leslie meets him, wind whipping her hair into semaphore flags of victory; they wed by candlelight in the great hall while the tide, still keeping the Spaniard’s secrets, booms its applause against the sea-caves below.
Synopsis
Leslie MacLeod, a young American who has come to Scotland after buying her ancestral castle, is admired by two suitors, young nobleman Lord Glenayr, whom she loves, and Lanzana, an unscrupulous Spaniard, whom she despises. Lanzana has been promised a title by the Spanish court if he recovers a chest of jewels that sank with the Spanish Armada off the Spanish coast. Angered by Leslie's refusal to marry him, Lanzana attempts to drug her wine, but she switches glasses. Once Lanzana falls unconscious, she steals his treasure map and presents it to Glenayr. With the aid of a friend's submarine, they find the wreck, and Glenayr dives for the treasure. When Glenayr finds Lanzana there already, they struggle; Lanzana drowns, and Glenayr secures the jewels and marries Leslie.
Review Excerpt
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There are films that history misplaces like loose pearls slipping through a corset seam, and then there is The Best of Luck—a 1920 silent curio that feels as though someone melted a Gothic penny dreadful into a reel of nitrate and wound it through a brass projector. I stumbled across a battered 16 mm print in an Edinburgh archive, the sort of vault where the air itself tastes of vinegar and forgotten c..."
