Brandon Coyle's wife: a sequel to "A skeleton in the closet"

About this book

"Brandon Coyle's Wife" by Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth is a novel written in the late 19th century. A sequel steeped in sensation and domestic melodrama, it follows Lady Arielle Montjoie as she publicly casts off the duplicitous Brandon Coyle, while the parallel story traces the suffering and moral endurance of the exiled Valdimir Desparde across the Atlantic. Expect secrets, forged proofs, disappearances, and a clash between honor and scandal that moves from English estates to New York and fever-stricken New Orleans.

The opening of the novel stages a dramatic rupture: during a family gathering, Lady Arielle declares she was never truly betrothed to Brandon Coyle because he had already married Christelle “Kit” Ken, producing Kit’s letter and “wedding lines,” which Coyle furiously tears up before Net Fleming corroborates the charge and reveals Kit’s sudden disappearance. Disowned by his uncle, Brandon storms out, aided only by his defiant sister, while gossip swiftly spreads and Arielle asks Net to come live at the castle with her children. The scene then shifts to the “exile,” Valdimir Desparde, who flees England under an alias, reaches New York in torment, and compassionately aids Annek Yok, a Shetland girl who arrives to find her husband dead; he escorts her to her brothers’ tobacconist shop in New Orleans. There he obsessively hunts a pamphlet about “John Sims, alias Valdimir Desparde,” hoping to pierce a mystery tied to his own disgrace, but a forged letter implying Arielle’s new betrothal fells him; recovering amid a yellow fever outbreak, he volunteers as a relief worker and, sent to the Yoks’ home, finds Annek and her child dead and the rest of the family gravely ill.