Lydia Gwilt in the American Melodrama Novel, or The Bride And Some Other People In The Tomb
Summary: Based on the novel Armadale by Wilkie Collins. Lydia Gwilt goes to America and has further adventures. There's a bride, a tomb, bloodthirsty murder, Spiritualism, monsters of various kinds, and maybe even a new passion for our brave antiheroine. Epistolary fic.
If you haven't read Armadale, I definitely recommend it - it's available for free at Project Gutenberg, and contains intriguing characterisation, a compelling plot, a supernatural thread, a deep and abiding love between two men even when one seems destined to murder the other, and an extremely fascinating female antihero in Lydia Gwilt. And then there was the creepy real life coincidence that happened not long after the novel was published, a cluster of fatalities on a ship that happened to bear a good deal of resemblance to the book's plot points ...
A/N: Written for Selenak and RR_Duscan for the New Year's Resolutions 2015 challenge.
I liked the prompt of Lydia Gwilt's continuing adventures, and I thought it might be fun to throw her into a different kind of story. This fic is inspired by nineteenth-century American dime novels, particularly 'The Bride of the Tomb' by Mrs Alex. McVeigh Miller.
Content note: Story contains period references to racism and slavery and includes terminology reflecting such.
—
Dec. 12, 1851
MY VERY DEAR OLDERSHAW,
I shall never forgive you for sending me here. After all, is it not your hand I see threading my life-line, since the days I was still innocent and beyond?
But I digress.
MY VERY DEAR DIARY,
I must say, for dear Mrs Oldershaw—Mother Jezebel, purveyor in paints, powders, and human flesh—is in another country, and no more do we correspond. I have my Drops, and let this be friend enough. I hear the terrible sound of a massacred Bach from the stateroom. May the wretched girl who plays it chain herself to the instrument and throw it into the sea.
Shall I capture recent events? Had I loved Ozias Midwinter and his dreadful name more than the virtues of a settled estate, had I encountered him in better days, had I not attempted to murder his dearest friend (and how dear, I wonder? Perhaps Miss Milroy will live to suspect her sweetheart's affections), I might yet be with him in penury and want. Else I might be dead in a poisoned room.
Let my pen not dwell on blighted misery. Diary, I spared his life, wrote a moving note promising my own death, thought better of it, and now I travel to America.
Shall it be a promised land, or bereft of all civilised interest? I have my Drops. I shall survive the voyage thus.