Readers of Anne Perry’s bestselling suspense novels revel in a world that is all their own, sharing the privileged existence of Britain’s wealthy and powerful elite in West End mansions and great country houses. It is also a world in which danger bides in unsuspected places and the line between good and evil can be razor thin. This new novel features Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould–one of the most memorable characters from the Thomas Pitt series–who appears here as a lively young woman, the ultimate aristocrat who can trace her blood to half the royal houses of Europe.
It’s Christmas and the Berkshire countryside lies wrapped in winter chill. But the well-born guests who have gathered at Applecross for a delicious weekend of innocent intrigue and passionate romance are warmed by roaring fires and candlelight, holly and mistletoe, good wine and gorgeously wrapped gifts. It’s scarcely the setting for misfortune, and no one–not even that clever young aristocrat and budding sleuth Vespasia Cumming-Gould–anticipates the tragedy that is to darken this light-hearted holiday house party.

My Review:

After yesterday’s book, I realized that what I wanted to round out this week of holiday reads wasn’t a romantic book filled with the holiday spirit, it was a murder mystery to see if getting killed at the holidays would turn the victim INTO a holiday spirit. The haunting kind, that is.

I was casting around for something that would fit that mood, and if possible something a bit like last week’s A Christmas Witness because that was just perfect for the reading mood I was in – but I’d already finished it.

Which reminded me of an entirely different holiday phenomenon – the way that the dead seemingly come back to life the minute that holiday songs start floating through the air. No matter which list of the ‘best’ or most popular holiday songs you look at, half the spots – or more – are taken up by classics that have been played year after year for decades, sung by great singers who have possibly become holiday spirits themselves.

That train of thought took me straight to this book and this series. After all, if it works so well for songs, why wouldn’t it work just as well for books?

A Christmas Journey is the first book in the late Anne Perry’s Christmas Stories series. A series that stretched to 21 books before the author’s death in 2023. Many of the stories in the series feature secondary characters from her two best-known historical mystery series, the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series and the William Monk series, both set during the Victorian era, but at slightly different points in time and circumstance.

This first book is a very loose prequel to the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series, featuring a beloved character, mentor and even a bit of a ‘fairy godmother’ to first Charlotte Pitt and her sister Emily and later to their entire extended family.

When we first met Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould in Paragon Walk, she was already a grande-dame of high society, an independent-minded, independently wealthy older woman with a great deal of influence and an abundance of wit, charm, and above all, intelligence. She aids Charlotte in many of her investigations, and is an active member of the Pitts’ ‘kitchen cabinet’.

(Readers of the Wrexford & Sloane series by Andrea Penrose will find that Lady Vespasia and Charlotte Sloane’s Aunt Alison, the Dowager Duchess of Peake, have a lot in common and would probably get along like a house on fire – quite possibly after setting said house on fire if it was necessary.)

The story we have here, A Christmas Journey, presents the reader with Lady Vespasia not as the redoubtable grande-dame we met in Paragon Walk, but is rather the portrait of the grande-dame as a diamond of the first water, a woman who still possesses the beauty of her youth but is just beginning to rely on the sharpness of her mind and her wit to see her through any difficulty.

And it’s difficulty she faces in this holiday mystery – even though it is not a murder mystery. It’s clear from the moment that Gwendolen Kilmuir’s body was found in the deepest part of the pond on the grounds of the estate in the midst of a holiday country house weekend that she took her own life.

Which doesn’t stop the attendees from assigning blame for her death. Someone, or something, drove her to suicide, and every single member of the party witnesses the instigating event. Gwendolen and another woman, Isobel Alvie, were vying for the same man. It seemed like Gwendolen was on the verge of securing her future with an offer of marriage when her rival used her cutting wit to cruelly cut down her character, her chances, and the character of her erstwhile fiancé into the bargain.

In the morning Gwendolen was dead and everyone not only blamed Alvie for her death but was gleefully looking forward to spreading the salacious gossip all over town the moment they returned.

Alvie was not guilty of murder, but the rumors and accusations would have cut her off from society. A young widow, with no family to support her – just as Gwendolen had been – Alvie would have been desperate as well as destitute, with no means of support and no skills with which to earn a living – except on her back.

It is proposed that Alvie undertake a journey of atonement and expiation, to deliver Gwendolen’s last letter, still sealed, to her mother in Inverness. If she completes her task, the others agree to leave the tragedy in the past and never talk about it. On their honor. If she fails or cries off, they can all say what they like to whom they like. But if she carries out her mission faithfully, and they gossip anyway, then they’ll be the ones ostracized.

It’s a bit of a genius solution for a group that thrives on gossip and social connections. What makes the story work as a story and as a mystery is that Vespasia accompanies Alvie on her journey, a trek which turns out to be much longer and considerably more dangerous than either woman imagined.

Along the way, Vespasia continues to work the puzzle in her own mind – not just the puzzle of the way society works that pitted Alvie and Gwendolen against each other, but also the puzzle of why a few cutting remarks were enough to push the woman over the edge – and whether anything could have been done to dissuade her from it.

Escape Rating B+: It’s clear in the end that this journey is the making of Vespasia, and it works considerably better if the reader already knows who she came to be. Underneath, it’s a story about women’s lives and the tiny, suffocating box that women of the upper classes were forced into. Their lives may have been gilded, but there were clearly times, and places, and men, who made the bars of their cages incredibly and sometimes literally, painful.

I found Vespasia’s journey, both her physical journey through the cold of a Scottish highland winter and her journey towards tempering her intelligence with her compassion, to be thoughtful and absorbing.

It absolutely did fit the reading mood I was in and it gave me greater insights into a character I enjoyed from a series that I loved from beginning to end. Some of the reviews (this book was originally published in 2003 so there are LOTS) found the story to be unsatisfactory for one reason or another. It isn’t particularly Christmas-y. It’s not a traditional mystery. It’s also not a very active story – except for the action of fighting the terrible weather across Scotland at a time before railroads connected Edinburgh directly to Glasgow.

Instead, it’s a quiet story that is wrapped tightly around Vespasia’s thoughts and conclusion, not just about this woman’s death, but about her life and the lives of women like her – and like the women back at that country house party that she does not want to give the satisfaction of letting them enjoy the meanness of their scandalmongering. A motivation that most readers should understand after meeting them.

But for anyone who remembers Vespasia fondly from the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series, it was lovely to see her again and be reminded of just how good that entire series was throughout. As many of the author’s Christmas Stories series provide the same service for other secondary characters in both the Pitt series and the William Monk series, I think I’ll be dipping back into these Christmas Stories for future holiday reads.