Stranger at Wildings

by Madeleine Brent

April 23rd, 2005

aka

Kirkby's Changeling

Copyright © 1975 by Souvenir Press Ltd

Here is a tale of charm and adventure - set in Europe around the turn of the century - whose colorful action ranges from a touring circus in Hungary to the fox-hunting society of the English countryside to the elegant circles of wealth and fashion in London.

It is the story of a spirited young woman of eighteen who has left an unhappy, uncertain past in England and made a new life for herself as a trapeze artist in a small touring circus...

But that forgotten past will stumble upon her one day, beside a stream in Hungary, where the circus has pitched its tents for a time. It will come in the form of a mysterious young man - handsome, appealing, yet curiously remote - whose appearance is the beginning of a strange, dangerous intrigue that involves deception, romance, disappearance and, in the end, the revelations of a family's darkest secrets.

She was known to her companions in the circus only as Chantal. She had joined them in England when she was thirteen - an orphan, as she believed, alone and abandoned.

Mr. Galletti and his grandchildren, Leo and Maria, had taken her in, and taught her the ways of circus life. Now at the age of eighteen she was an accomplished trapeze artist. Her past was far behind, and all but forgotten. Until she met the young Englishman in Hungary who called himself Martin. He had wandered into her life one day, dazed and disheveled, claiming to have lost his memory. But he stirred something in Chantal - whether remembrance, or affection, or fear she could not tell.

When he disappeared again, as mysteriously as he had come, Chantal might have forgotten him. But on that very night, as she performed with Leo and Maria, there was an "accident" - involving a broken trapeze bar - and Chantal very nearly lost her life. It was, unquestionably, a case of sabotage, and Martin was the only real suspect.

Then, within a fortnight, two visitors arrived at the circus, from England, asking for Chantal. Gideon Sumner and his sister Belinda had traveled a very long way to find her and tell her for the first time of the true circumstances surrounding her birth - of the relatives she had never known who now waited to welcome her back.

Her journey, in time, would take her far from Hungary, and the circus, and the stranger called Martin - to Wildings, an ancient home in the English countryside. And there she would find that the mystery of her past had only just begun to unfold.