tamaranth | 2025/057: The Gentleman and his Vowsmith

2025/057: The Gentleman and his Vowsmith — Rebecca Ide

What is unethical is ... a society where we’ve turned magic into a cage and love into an impossibility, such that murder is an easier resort than words... [loc. 4733]

A delightfully Gothic country house murder mystery set in a Regency-flavoured queer-normative England, with magic, automata, dark family secrets and a legal mechanism for severing one's family ties and owning oneself.

Nicholas Monterris, our viewpoint character, is 'gay as a spoon' [do not expect historically-accurate slang here] and has seldom left the draughty and probably-haunted decay of Monterris Court. He's aghast to discover that his father, the Duke of Vale, has arranged a marriage between Nic and Lady Leaf Serral, daughter of a wealthy family. Worse, the bride-to-be and her family have descended on Monterris Court, where all those in possession of Brilliance (magical ability) will be locked in while the marriage contract is vowsmithed. And worst of all, the master vowsmith engaged to make sure that contract is watertight and magically binding is Nic's ex -- Dashiell sa Vare, who left abruptly and without explanation nine years ago.

Monterris Court has all the trappings of a Gothic mansion: Nic's mother, gently mad and reclusive; the mysterious fate of Nic's uncle Francis; a grotto full of automaton parts, and the sigil tape on which automaton-instructions are magically encoded; secret passages, rumours of ghosts, crumbling stonework and moss and mould. Leaf, who is an avid reader of murder mysteries, wants to start a school for young women, and does not want to marry (or have sexual relations with) anybody, is a breath of fresh air for Nic. And soon enough there's a murder to solve... and then another...

Meanwhile, Dash and Nic warily circle one another, failing to communicate. (Indeed, Dash's version of 'closure' seems to be anything but.) Who's the murderer? What really happened to Lord Francis? Why did the Duke not marry the man he loved? What is the Duchess writing so obsessively? And why is it so vital that Nic and Leaf's marriage be accomplished as soon as possible?

Despite the presence of books by Mrs Radcliffe and Laurence Sterne, it's not 'the Regency' -- for one thing, there's a king -- and the history of this alternate Britain is only lightly sketched. The magic seems to be syllabic, and can produce startlingly vivid effects. Nic, though immensely talented as a magic-user, has seldom left Monterris Court: instead, he's devoted his time to making mechanical frogs, and to reading. Leaf quickly becomes a friend (a much more pleasing development than the all-too-common 'obstacle to true queer love') and Dashiell and Nic manage to resolve the issue of Dash's sudden departure all those years ago. The epilogue ties everything up neatly, and the author's afterword explains the notion of 'sasine' ('a historical word meaning the conferring of possession of feudal property') and how it can be used to confer self-ownership -- something Leaf has requested nearly thirty times since her eighth birthday, and you can see her point.

I enjoyed this immensely, and forgave the occasional typos. Nic and Leaf were delightful, the villains were suitably wicked, the victims were sympathetic enough that their fates were shocking. I'm fascinated by this world of Brilliance and sasine, and would love to read more about it.