Seven for a Secret

Gillian Lovekin is the daughter of a lonely farm up on the high moorland of Shropshire. Her widowed father, Isaiah, is wealthy, but rustic. In a cottage on the farm lives the Makepeace family: old, slow, garrulous and accident-prone Jonathan, the man-of-all-work, his wife Abigail, cheerful and practical cook and washerwoman, and Abigail's son from a previous marriage, Robert Rideout, the farm's young cowman-shepherd.

Gillian and Robert have known each other since childhood, their natures mutually understood like the backs of their hands. But as she has grown older Gillian has come to realise that she is the mistress of the farm, and Robert only one of its workers. The quicksilver of her domineering and attention-loving personality clashes playfully with Robert's more easeful and serious steadiness. She has a beginning notion that he cares deeply for her, but the idea of marrying someone so much her social inferior simply can't be countenanced.

When an outsider buys the only other building on their part of the moor, a lonely, decrepit pub called The Mermaid's Rest, Gillian is intrigued by him. Ralph Elmer seems worldly, sophisticated and capable, and most crucially pays her exactly the sort of attention she likes: she is showered with gifts and extravagantly noticed. Her youthful innocence on the one hand, and feelings of intense sensual curiosity on the other, combine to bring about a situation where she has no choice but to marry him, despite her growing feeling of unease about his enigmatic manipulativeness.

Robert and Ralph have been navigating a halting truce, despite Robert's heartbreak at Gillian's cruel rejection of him. But when Robert hears the account of a gipsy friend whose baby daughter disappeared in mysterious circumstances many years before, something clicks inside him. His suspicions about Elmer, and his actions toward his exposure, precipitate a hidden tumult of confrontation, desperation and, ultimately, murder.

In Seven for a Secret, first published in 1922, Mary Webb took up the skeins which had exemplified her talent hitherto, and twisted them yet further. It is a vibrant novel of fatedness, comedy and rural realities, dedicated to Thomas Hardy. But now this quality became soaked through with near-pagan fabular tinctures, its potent action transpiring under looming skies of otherworldly colour; a brilliant mythic tale which has the numinous feeling of a May-game gone disastrously astray.