Blog Tour: The Golden Key by Marian Womack

Today is my turn on the blog tour for The Golden Key by Marian Womack. Thank you to Titan Books for inviting me to be on this tour and for providing me with a review copy. I’m sharing an excerpt from The Golden Key below. The book is out now!

She noticed the silence, for no bird could be heard. And where had the breeze gone that should have moved the canopy above her head? The branches she saw, forming a substitute, withering ceiling, were oddly still. And yet she knew that, were she to come out the other side of the copse and move away from the house, she would feel the wind again, freshening up her face.

Helena thought she had seen jackdaws as well—why were they so silent? Why were they acting as if they were mere shadows of their brothers and sisters on the other side of the copse? Were they shadows of their brothers and sisters?

The only audible sound was a faint murmur of water, waves splashing and breaking in foaming splendour. Where did it come from? Completely disorientated for a second, something that didn’t happen to her often, she could not figure out which direction the sea was, or how far away. She had thought that she had come farther from it, not closer, when leaving the village. To say that she was confused would be to understate the obvious: Helena knew where she was; but then, she was lost also. Or rather she felt lost.

As soon as she realised this, a sense of dread took hold of her, as if her being lost were not a temporary state, but one that threatened to carry on forever.

Then she thought of them, those three little girls, lost the same year that Samuel Moncrieff had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. And she tried to imagine them in that horrid place, in those ruins where, according to the records, they had been so fond of playing.

The story ran as follows: In 1881 the three Matthews sisters, Maud, Alice and Flora, mysteriously vanished during a hunting weekend at their father’s newly built manor house in east Norfolk. The search that followed the disappearance centred on this new building, with its peculiarities of construction (the eccentric architect had later jumped from a tower), and also took in the members of the hunting party, the Broads’ quicksands and marshy beaches. Downham Market Horse Fair had just taken place—true, it was on the other side of the county, but nonetheless it had brought in gypsies from all over the land, crisscrossing the Fens, raising fears that the girls had been kidnapped.

Helena had flinched when she had read this, wondered what her great-grandmother, a proud and beautiful Andalusian Roma who married an aristocratic landowner, would have made of reading something so daringly expressed by a reckless newspaper.

Whatever had happened to Maud, Alice and Flora, the truth of the matter was that nothing was ever found. The girls were never seen again. Lord Matthews died shortly after. Their stepmother, the new Lady Matthews, became a recluse. A distant cousin from an impoverished line of the family, much younger than Lord Matthews, and going from being the children’s governess to being their stepmother, some malicious minds had seen foul play at work, and she had been a suspect for some time. In the end they could not charge her with anything, so the matter was dropped. But it did not surprise Helena to find out that her line of the family, although as poor as a church mouse, in fact used to own the estate before losing it to an entail.

That was the tale.

Once upon a time, three little girls, gone.