2017/62: Touch not the Cat -- Mary Stewart

'Only you were reading my thoughts. Do you often do that?'
A pause, as long as four quickened heartbeats. Then he said, easily: 'Twin and I do it as a matter of course. Shades of Bess Ashley, the gipsy, didn’t you know?'
'It must save a lot of telephone calls,' I said lightly. [loc. 2067]

Bryony Ashley has grown up with an invisible friend: a member of her own family (though she's not sure which one) who communicates directly with her, mind to mind. The two start as friends, and come to love one another, though it is -- for the time being -- a necessarily unconsummated love.

Then Bryony's father dies in a hit-and-run, and her mysterious lover calls her home from Madeira to the crumbling splendour of Ashley Court, and the company of her twin cousins James and Emory. Still puzzling over her father's puzzling final words -- a cat on a pavement, a letter in the brook -- Bryony becomes aware of two things: firstly, that her father was murdered; and secondly, that the murderer might be her secret lover.

This is a charming and well-paced novel, with an element of the Gothic and the ability to laugh at itself. It's hard to tell when it's set (possibly the mid-Seventies, when it was written?) at least partly because of the sense that little ever changes at Ashley Court. There are flashbacks, too, to an earlier time in the family's history: 1835, when two lovers are trying to keep their relationship secret.

Though the romance is threaded through the novel (the chapter headings are quotations from Romeo and Juliet) it's not the sole plot: there is the mystery of Bryony's father's dying words, the identity of the person or persons who arranged his murder, the family's failing finances, the American tenants of Ashley Court, the overgrown maze in the middle of the garden, and the risk of further flood damage. A satisfying mystery and a comfortable romance, though I confess I didn't warm to the characters.