As part of the continuing Maxwell Gray project, I just finished reading her last novel (though not her last published work): the 1918 The Diamond Pendant, retitled The Black Opal in the USA. Like many/most of Maxwell Gray's works, it's loosely a romantic melodrama, though with crime fiction elements, set in the years immediately before the First World War.
The novel begins with a prologue - "Ships that pass in the night" - set on an idyllic day on the River Thames at Richmond (you have one guess where MG lived at the time of writing) when sixteen-year-old Lesbia Wymond is enjoying an afternoon boating with older friends. She drops her hat in the river, and an unknown young man falls in trying to retrieve it. Lesbia hauls him out, and he's struck with her Snow White style of beauty - "red as the blood, white as the snow, black as the ebony" presumably not her eyes, hair and teeth) - before they go their separate ways. On returning home to her father Spencer, a writer, she's told that her older sister Mabel, who has been in a nursing home in Bournemouth, has died. A little later she receives an anonymous poem about "Ships that pass in the night" from an overseas address.
The action jumps to some years later to the social circuit of a group of upper middle class Home Counties families circling around the elderly Lady Emily. The chief focus of events is matchmaking - a romance is in the offing between Lady Emily's two godchildren: the respectable Stella Morland, and Oswald Bywater, a rather stiff young soldier just back from the North West Frontier (he reveals to an Army friend that he's the man who fell in the river and sent the poem). The other two chief plot points are that Lady Emily owns a priceless but ill-fated diamond and opal pendant; and that the house has a governess called Miss Whyte.
The lacklustre romance between Stella and Oswald trundles ahead ("there was no better pal than Stella Morland, he thought") - and then crashes when, on a skating party, Oswald sees the woman ("red as the blood, white as the snow, black as the ebony") who saved him years ago. It turns out that "Miss Whyte" is in fact Lesbia Wymond. She's intelligent, beautiful, popular as governess, and even has talents as a private detective, having tracked down a missing ring to a magpie's nest (though at least one person wonders why it nicked banknotes too). She explains to Oswald that she changed identity to escape the trauma of the past. He rapidly falls for her, and writes to Stella about it ("I'm three times the idiot over her I was at first"). What Oswald doesn't know is that Lesbia is being threatened by a mysterious character she's meeting in the garden.
Lesbia, however, is not that good a governess, as she lacks education. She's just about to be dismissed for this, when the problem is removed by her engagement to Oswald. Lesbia gets another visit from the mystery man - evidently a blackmailer who wants her to perform an unspecified service - and after being taken into Lady Emily's confidence about security arrangements for the pendant, marries Oswald, and they go off honeymooning across Europe.
After an extensive Maxwell Gray travelogue, they arrive in Monte Carlo, where Lesbia is horrified to overhear some gossip: that her sister isn't dead, but ran off with a married man. She wants to call out the gossipers, sue them, whatever, but Oswald forbids it. Eventually her tells her why: it's true. Mabel ran off with a singer called Bruce Villars, and Lesbia's father kept the fact from her (but told Oswald so he knew what he was getting into). Meanwhile, other things are getting ominous. Oswald has seen an item of Lady Emily's jewellery in a shop in the South of France, and news comes that police investigations are continuing in England following the opal-diamond pendant's disappearance a while back.
A mess of forensic detail has produced a group of suspects who were in or near Lady Emily's house when the pendant went missing - Bruce Villars, several house servants, and Stella Morland - and they go on trial. Lesbia is only to be called as a witness, but something is evidently weighing heavily on her, both mentally and physically; she has a miscarriage, and is sent to recuperate in the Isle of Wight. Ultimately Stella, presumably out of compassion, omits to testify that she saw Lesbia in an incriminating location in the house, and likely guilt falls on Stella, who is bailed pending a full Crown Court trial.
Meanwhile Oswald and Lesbia are off holidaying on the Italian Lakes, but the idyll comes to an end one evening when Lesbia drops her jewellery case, and - OMG! - out falls the opal-diamond pendant. She explains everything to Oswald; how she knew about Mabel's affair with Bruce Villars, and came to be blackmailed by him from her teens, and driven to a career of theft, after trying to buy back incriminating letters. Oswald says he'll stand by her, but he'll still shop her, and he does.
Stella is released, and Lesbia goes to prison for two years. Her father kills himself, and Oswald has to leave the Service to repay the cost of the remaining missing jewels. On Lesbia's release, she and Oswald emigrate to live in the wilds of Canada, starting a new life and having five children.
But there's more coming. A beggar woman turns up at their door, and it's Lesbia's ruined sister Mabel, still married to Bruce Villars. Villars, sore at having to quit England, has sought out Oswald and plans to kill him. Lesbia rushes through the snowy forest to the plannned ambush location, and Villars shoots her fatally. Oswald returns to England with his children, farming them off to Stella as their guardian (Lesbia's last wish). He and Stella part wistfully but amicably in August 1914: she to join the Red Cross, he posted to Flanders.
An interesting last novel. I found it very readable in general, and the mystery premise was well done. But I do wonder if Maxwell Gray had reached a stage of self-critique. She begins with an extensive description of the naff romantic works of Lesbia's father, Spencer Wymond, in which the heroines
The novel is illustrated with four plates. As can be seen, they seem to focus on emotional moments rather than action: a pretty dull choice considering the novel has a boating accident, people falling through the ice at a skating party, and the heroine being shot in a Canadian forest.
- Ray![]()
The novel begins with a prologue - "Ships that pass in the night" - set on an idyllic day on the River Thames at Richmond (you have one guess where MG lived at the time of writing) when sixteen-year-old Lesbia Wymond is enjoying an afternoon boating with older friends. She drops her hat in the river, and an unknown young man falls in trying to retrieve it. Lesbia hauls him out, and he's struck with her Snow White style of beauty - "red as the blood, white as the snow, black as the ebony" presumably not her eyes, hair and teeth) - before they go their separate ways. On returning home to her father Spencer, a writer, she's told that her older sister Mabel, who has been in a nursing home in Bournemouth, has died. A little later she receives an anonymous poem about "Ships that pass in the night" from an overseas address.
 |
| Oswald and Stella's hot romance |
The lacklustre romance between Stella and Oswald trundles ahead ("there was no better pal than Stella Morland, he thought") - and then crashes when, on a skating party, Oswald sees the woman ("red as the blood, white as the snow, black as the ebony") who saved him years ago. It turns out that "Miss Whyte" is in fact Lesbia Wymond. She's intelligent, beautiful, popular as governess, and even has talents as a private detective, having tracked down a missing ring to a magpie's nest (though at least one person wonders why it nicked banknotes too). She explains to Oswald that she changed identity to escape the trauma of the past. He rapidly falls for her, and writes to Stella about it ("I'm three times the idiot over her I was at first"). What Oswald doesn't know is that Lesbia is being threatened by a mysterious character she's meeting in the garden.
Lesbia, however, is not that good a governess, as she lacks education. She's just about to be dismissed for this, when the problem is removed by her engagement to Oswald. Lesbia gets another visit from the mystery man - evidently a blackmailer who wants her to perform an unspecified service - and after being taken into Lady Emily's confidence about security arrangements for the pendant, marries Oswald, and they go off honeymooning across Europe.
 |
| Lesbia finds that the scandalous rumour about Mabel is true |
 |
| Stella sees Lesbia creeping around the house |
 |
| The game's up - time to send for the rozzers |
Stella is released, and Lesbia goes to prison for two years. Her father kills himself, and Oswald has to leave the Service to repay the cost of the remaining missing jewels. On Lesbia's release, she and Oswald emigrate to live in the wilds of Canada, starting a new life and having five children.
But there's more coming. A beggar woman turns up at their door, and it's Lesbia's ruined sister Mabel, still married to Bruce Villars. Villars, sore at having to quit England, has sought out Oswald and plans to kill him. Lesbia rushes through the snowy forest to the plannned ambush location, and Villars shoots her fatally. Oswald returns to England with his children, farming them off to Stella as their guardian (Lesbia's last wish). He and Stella part wistfully but amicably in August 1914: she to join the Red Cross, he posted to Flanders.
An interesting last novel. I found it very readable in general, and the mystery premise was well done. But I do wonder if Maxwell Gray had reached a stage of self-critique. She begins with an extensive description of the naff romantic works of Lesbia's father, Spencer Wymond, in which the heroines
were in the habit of falling into consumptions and brain-fevers on the smallest provocation, and made a point of fainting at critical moments to embarrass villains and calumniators and break false swains' hearts.This has got to be self-referential, as it's descriptive of any number of Maxwell Gray heroines, and there are even two female faintings in the next chapters of this very novel!
"Mabel is dead," said Mrs Chevening, crying quietly, and Lesbia dropped like a stone to the floor.Another angle, a biographical one, is that I'm beginning to wonder if Maxwell Gray became a Roman Catholic in later life. This novel is very Graham Greene in its take on atonement - the idea that only death can atone for bad deeds. Lesbia has atoned by doing time and living a reformed life, yet MG has to kill her to get real closure. I'd been forming this idea after reading her previous novel, The World Mender, in which characters are moved by Catholic shrines and worship, and the introductory religious poem is titled Spes Unica, an unmistakable allusion to the motto Ave crux spes unica. This is purely speculation at this stage; but MG is such an autobiographical writer that such intuitions have proved worth following previously.
...
Lady Emily could contain herself no longer, but, with streaming eyes and low murmurs of thankfulness, was starting to the spot where her godson lay, when she felt something heavy and soft strike her from behind and almost throw her, and, turning, saw Stella sunk together in a heap on the grass.
The novel is illustrated with four plates. As can be seen, they seem to focus on emotional moments rather than action: a pretty dull choice considering the novel has a boating accident, people falling through the ice at a skating party, and the heroine being shot in a Canadian forest.
- Ray
