Review: The Fire Within

The Fire Within by Patricia Wentworth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this up under the impression that it was a classic mystery. And at first, it seemed like it would be.

Old Edward is rather a nasty old man who is dying of (probably - it's never said outright) cancer. He has little other than contempt for his brother's son, also named Edward; he much prefers Edward's childhood companion David, now Old Edward's doctor. His wards are sisters Mary and Elizabeth. Mary is recently married to Edward, but David has never got over being in love with her. Elizabeth is in love with David, but it's unrequited; her friend Agneta's brother Louis nurses a similarly unrequited love for Elizabeth. There's also another woman, the widow of the doctor whose practice David took over, who has her eye on David as well.

David, out of principle, refuses to let Old Edward leave him any legacy, so it's mostly willed to the younger Edward, with some provision for Elizabeth.

And then David is called because Old Edward has taken a turn, and is close to death. The old man tells him, "I was fine until I drank from that cup. Edward brought it to me." David tests the dregs in Old Edward's home chemistry lab; there's a huge dose of arsenic.

And then Mary asks him, for her sake, because he once said he'd do anything for her, to just sign the death certificate so there won't be an inquest. Against everything he believes in, and believing that he's becoming an accessory to murder in so doing, he does so, unable to resist his appeal - and it breaks him.

Spoiler tags from here on. (view spoiler)[Shortly after this, both David and Edward receive letters from Old Edward, which he'd arranged to have sent to them with some delay, revealing that it was one of his nasty jokes - he put the arsenic in the cup himself, as a way of ending his suffering that would also cause problems for Edward, but he doesn't want Edward actually convicted of his murder.

This doesn't help David at all. He did what he did, believing what he believed, and he despises himself, and, increasingly, Mary. He's unable to sleep, and starts drinking heavily.

Eventually, Elizabeth is able to grant him sleep, using a mystical connection that she has to the Divine. Desperate, he marries her so that they can be together and she can help him sleep. He sees her only as his old childhood friend, but hopes that eventually they can come to be truly married.

He's had a recurring dream for many years of a mysterious woman in the moonlight by the sea. He used to sleepwalk during this dream. Not long after his marriage, he starts doing so again, and comes to Elizabeth at night, unconscious of what he's doing.

She becomes pregnant, shortly after Mary has also conceived. (Elizabeth and Mary - the choice of names is surely intentional.) But how can she tell David? (hide spoiler)]

The passages dealing with Elizabeth's mystical consciousness reminded me very much of Charles Williams. And after setting everything up for potential tragedy, even an actual murder, the author pulls off what I call the Glorious Ending, where someone acts so much out of love that it completely transforms the outcome.

The author's prose, without being showy or complicated, is expressive and intelligent. There are a lot of (unattributed) poetry quotations at the heads of chapters; I think many of them may be Tennyson, who was the favourite poet of the author's later detective character Miss Silver, but I don't know Tennyson well enough to be certain.

The human relationships are a good deal deeper than you get in a standard classic mystery, because they're the focus of the story. It's definitely a novel, properly so called, and in its way it's a romance, though it's an unusual one. It's not my usual reading, but I enjoyed it considerably, and was gripped by it to the extent that, reading it on the train, I had some difficulty staying aware of which stations we were passing through so I could get off at the right time.

I'll definitely be looking for more from this author. Happily, she's remained popular enough that I can get a lot of her books, mainly the Miss Silver series, from the library.

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