Nine Coaches Waiting (1958)

What I love is the pace and the the sheer beauty of the writing. The pace is very varied with movement of the plot interwoven with descriptions of the villages and flora and fauna of the countryside bringing it alive with sights and smells and sounds. The back stories of various characters are also woven in, and the author always shows us characters rather than telling us how we should judge them. Delightful not just for the first reading, but plenty to enjoy reading over ( in my case many times over) again. ( )

Mary Stewart's prose is nothing short of gorgeous. What a pure delight to read. ( )

Nine Coaches Waiting
by Mary Stewart
1958
4.5/5

Linda Martin, is a young orphaned French woman living in England. After 10 years in the UK, she is returning to Paris to work as a governess for a 9 year old Phillippe de Valmy.

Phillippe will inherit the entire estate in Savoy but his handsome uncle is willing to kill to make sure he does not inherit the estate. Meanwhile Linda has fallen in love.....

Stewart, a Gothic fiction master, is an expert in suspense building, and giving a feel of danger, and this one does not disappoint with this romantic gothic thriller! ( )

Although I’ve had Mary Stewart’s Merlin novels sitting on my shelf for some time, this is the first of her books that I’ve actually read and so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. But with delight I found myself drawn into its deliciously Gothic modern tale of a governess in a remote French chateau: a tale of avarice, greed and attempted murder. After all, when you are alone in the world, who can you trust?

Having spent most of her childhood in an orphanage, Linda Martin finally sees a way out of her dead-end life when one of the institution’s supporters recommends her to a friend for a job. This friend, Madame de Valmy, is a French chatelaine looking for a governess for her nine-year-old nephew Philippe, also an orphan. A shy, quiet English girl seems to be just the thing. There’s only one problem: Madame de Valmy is quite clear that she doesn’t want a girl who can speak French, as she wants the governess to speak only English with Philippe. Linda is half-English and half-French, but she decides to hide this inconvenient fact in favour of securing the job of her dreams. And so, presently, she finds herself heading off to Paris and thence to Valmy, a sprawling and beautiful chateau in the wooded hills near the Swiss border. Here she meets her new family properly: fragile, cold Madame de Valmy; her dangerously charismatic husband Léon de Valmy, confined to a wheelchair by a tragic accident; and, of course, Linda’s new charge Philippe...

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2018/08/13/mary-stewart-nine-coaches-waiting/ ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2018/10/201864-nine-coaches-waiting-mary-stewart.... ( )