Green Darkness

627 pp. George Chrichard jacket art. Green Darkness is the story of a great love, in which mysticism, suspense, and mystery form a web of good and evil forces that stretches from sixteenth-century England to the England of today. It is also a brilliant and accurate reconstruction of the Tudor period as it affects the loves and tragedies of the characters. For the past several hundred years the chronicle of the Marsdon family has been kept up to date by the head of the house. The vital statistics of births, marriages, and deaths have been duly filled in. An entry dated 1585 lists the death of a younger son, Stephen Marsdon, a Benedictine monk, and speculates on the possible connection between his death and the simultaneous disappearance of a young woman. The question remained unsolved until the year 1968, when Richard Marsdon married and brought his young wife home to Medfield Place. Richard and Celia were very much in love and very happy at first, though there was always the threat of danger somewhere in the background. But now Richard has withdrawn into himself and Celia is bewildered and haunted by a vague dread. Fortunately for Celia, one person senses the danger and is wise enough to understand that the past can reach across centuries to influence the present. When Celia breaks down completely and her reason and life are at stake, Dr. Akananda knows that only by forcing her to relive the past can he enable her to escape it. Lying between life and death, Celia goes back four hundred years to become once more that other Celia, beautiful and ill-starred. Through her, we see the England of the Tudors, torn by religious strife, as the young Protestant King Edward is succeeded by his Catholic sister Mary -- each as narrow and intolerant as the other. We see the pageantry, the conflict, the lustiness, the cruelty inflicted in the name of a merciful God. The troubled lives of Celia de Bohun and Stephen Marsdon were closely bound up in the great events of their times. They could not escape the terrible consequences of their love in that life, but now fate offers them another chance for redemption. In Green Darkness, Anya Seton does for sixteenth-century England what her Katherine did for the fourteenth century. No one writing today has a greater capacity to make the reader feel the joys and stresses of another age.