Rating: 4/5
This book is the story of Sally Lockhart. Her father, Captain Matthew Lockhart, a shipping agent from London, recently died near the East India Docks. His trustworthy schooner, Lavinia, tragically sank, killing all on board. Sally now had many problems ahead of her: one, living with her father’s second cousin, Mrs Caroline Rees; two, the letter; three, the nightmare; and four, the overall sadness that overcame her after her father’s death, fifteen years after her mother’s.
Mrs Rees was a hateful old crone, a truly cruel character who ‘did not seek’ and ‘did not want’ to become Sally’s “aunt”, but who woud ‘not shrink away from the idea’. Perhaps because of this, she was one of the hundreds of reasons why Sally’s life turned miserable after her father’s demise.
The letter came from Singapore. Sally expected it to be from her late father’s trustworthy friend, Mr van Eeden, but the handwriting was scruffy and uneducated, the grammar appalling and, thought Sally, what good European gentleman would write like that? The letter told her simply to beware of the “Seven Blessings”, and that “Marchanks” would help. Who Marchbanks was she did not know, and where he lived she had not known until a porter at her father’s offices informed her that the word underneath this advice, “Chattum”, meant Chatham in Kent, which surely was where this fellow lived. But of anything else, no one knew.
The nightmare was terribly confusing. Sally would have it once or twice a year, and would wake up in suffocating heat, drenched in perspiration and sobbing in fright – her father would come running, but now that there was no father, what to do? Sally did not know. The nightmare pictured a black space, and then a flickering light such as a candle would appear. Then the certain masculine screams of a man in terrible agony; then someone would say, “Look! Look at him – dear God – look -” But Sally did not want to look. And that would be the time that she would wake up.
And now she had no one. No mother, no father – only Mrs Rees, of course, but she had made her feel so unwelcome (from not giving her the key to the house so that she would have to be let in by the maid when she wanted to come in, to having her “servant’s name” changed to Veronica by her new carer) that she was no relative to her anymore.
As the story unfolds, Sally plunges deeper into the adventure, coming across both allies and villains along the way. Soon a Ruby is involved in the story, confusing Sally more than ever before; the Nightmare becomes a vital key to help her get along, yet there is only one particularly foul way to get into it when she chooses; and finally, some characters are not as they seem…
My favourite characters were Matthew and Nicholas Bedwell, though these have not been mentioned here previously. Matthew, a strong and most helpful ally though heavy opium-smoker, and Nicholas, a kind and jolly Reverend of a local church, are brothers – identical twins. Can this get in the way of the villains’ idea of the story?