The Enamel Eye

This could be a satire on every non-Aga saga ever written. For the literal-minded it is a salacious story of sin, crime, death and disaster over the century from Waterloo to the First World War. The earlier curse of an unwilling bride touches all her descendants from her marriage with her spendthrift Tesson father ’s chief creditor, who also takes his estate. She bears this husband a son, then elopes with her cousin. The descent of the moneylender become lords of the manor, while those from the elopement become their servants and concubines.

     The estate of Lackmere possesses a floor of Romano-British tiles which are cemented over as improper by the fourth Lord Corbell. Though he is ordered to marry a selected cousin to restore the bloodline, the future fourth lord runs off with a silly young woman who tight-laces, ensuring that the child of the marriage will be deformed.

    This son, Edmund, finds an enamel miniature of his sinful grandmother and is ordered to sink the smashed fragments in the lake. He manages to secrete one green eye. Meantime his father, the prurient fourth Lord, succumbs to fleshly desire for the only woman his son will ever love. The result is a daughter who is deaf from birth injury, randy and eventually seduced by the black-hearted cousin Alfred. In revenge, Edmund marries Alfred ’s golden-haired fiancée despite her protests. He also removes the cement from the tiles to expose their erotic images.

    A small plain governess arrives to teach their backward daughter; only to suffer at the hands of the lecherous lord. Results multiply, and the manipulative housekeeper, formerly a Tesson, who has borne a child to the third lord, determines that through her brain-damaged grandson, last of the old line, Tessons shall again become squires of Lackmere.
    It is a story of much wanton lust, well set against the historical backdrop of the 19th century.