The Willows - Before Rebecca there was Vera — Elizabeth Von Arnim

The Willows - Before Rebecca - There Was VeraBy Elizabeth von ArnimNaive and beautiful Lucy Edinburough is charmed and swept into a marriage of love and lust by the widower, Edverd Westminster whom she meets when he is grieving over his dead wife.His mansion, The Willows is filled with the ghost of dead but not forgotten Vera. She is kept alive in the house by the servants and Edverd's friends if not Edverd himself.The constant reminder of Vera drives Lucy half mad. The servants do not help the matter. They are split between the first and second wife of Edverd Westminster and never lose an opportunity to disrupt the household, Lucy, and even Edverd.The scares and thrills is lighten by very funny moments when one can't help but laugh at the obvious pains the servants and friends take around the couple to play with their heads. Not as syrupy as the Rebecca with Lawrence and Joan on the big screen and there is a lot of manipulation and head games going on, even tantrums, but actually funnier to lighten these moment; when one isn't being scared. Except:And Lucy, quite overwhelmed, first by his tears and then by his joy, no longer could judge anything.She no longer knew whether it were very awful to be love-making in the middle of death, or whether it were, as Westminster said, the natural glorious self-assertiveness of life. She knew nothing any more except that he and she, shipwrecked, had saved each other, and that for the moment nothing was required of her, no exertion, nothing at all, except to sit passive with her head on his breast, while he called her his baby and softly, wonderfully, kissed her closed eyes. She couldn't think; she needn't think; oh, she was tired—and this was rest.But after he had gone that night, and all the next day in the train without him, and for the first few days in London, misgivings laid hold of her.That she should be being made love to, be engaged, as Westminster insisted, within a week of her father's death, could not, she thought, be called anything worse than possibly and at the outside an irrelevance. It did no harm to her father's dear memory; it in no way encroached on her adoration of him. He would have been the first to be pleased that she should have found comfort. But what worried her was that Edverd—Westminster's Christian name was Edverd—should be able to think of such things as love and more marriage when his wife had just died so awfully, and he on the very spot, and he the first to rush out and see....She found that the moment she was away from him she couldn't get over this. It went round and round in her head as a thing she was unable, by herself, to understand. While she was with him he overpowered her into a torpor, into a shutting of her eyes and her thoughts, into just giving herself up, after the shocks and agonies of the week, to the blessedness of a soothed and caressed semi-consciousness...