LEGACY OF DEATH

Dastardly doings at an English manor house.

For reasons that are never entirely clear, some of the servants at Thorncroft House, Lord Croft’s estate, have been named trustees of the place, along with the capital-F Family’s solicitor, the local doctor, the vicar, and several other prominent villagers. The Family wing has been converted into an asylum, although it’s never quite clear which members of the Family are being housed there or why. The trustees are also in charge of a large-scale project renovating the villagers’ dwellings to give them more room, better sanitation, and such other improvements as the villagers themselves propose. It all comes to a screeching halt when some Roman ruins are found beneath the excavation and then one of the trustees is found lying in a construction pit. Former butler Samuel Bowman isn’t dead, but he’s gravely injured, so former housekeeper Harriet Rowsley and her husband, Matthew, who seem to be first among equals in the world of the trustees, bring him back to Thorncroft House to convalesce under the watchful eyes of Nurse Pegg. Meanwhile, Lord Croft’s second cousin and heir, Julius Trescothick, arrives and ruffles everyone’s feathers by treating the servants as servants. As the trustees plot to relieve themselves of the disagreeable heir, a housemaid discovers that someone’s been pilfering artwork from the storage room upstairs. More trustees are assaulted, the villagers protest the work stoppage, and Trescothick ups the ante by refusing to dine with anyone who doesn’t refuse to dine with him.

Nobody dies, but it takes a village, quite literally, to put things right upstairs, downstairs, inside out.