Grief Before Night

To every man, joy and grief before night.

~Old Norse proverb


Count and Countess Falke of Falkenborg are deeply in debt and are about to lose the ancient but respectably shabby family castle when they meet Patricia Morier, a wealthy American heiress, who feels a tingle along her veins when she first sets eyes on the passionate and masterful Count and instantly falls in love. Since the Count doesn't resist their mutual attraction too energetically, Patricia promptly buys the dilapidated estate next door and engages the Count to help her plan its restoration. The Countess, also American but lacking the marble shoulders and black chiffon of her new neighbor, tends to her garden, counts the freckles popping out on her sunburned nose, supervises the tenants, figures out how to live more thriftily, weeps on the old housekeeper's shoulder, and raises the baby, while the husband she loves tries to wheedle yet another loan from his banker and gallops across the countryside between the two estates to supervise the makeover. Or, so he says.


All might be well, if the Count can resist the womanly and not insignificant financial allure of the hot heiress, and if the said heiress can zip her lip and keep to herself the scandalous secret she knows about the Countess.  


Peter Loring met his future wife, Vivan Georgia Lovegrove Borg, on a trip to Sweden in 1914, so it's not surprising that this romance is set in the beautiful Swedish countryside accompanied by the odd troll or two.  Published in 1938, Grief Before Night will please readers ready to lose themselves in the flurries and furies of a dramatic  love triangle.