The Night Drifter, by Susan Carroll

I read Susan Carroll's St. Leger's series without reading any reviews or even the back cover blurbs. So as I finished The Bride Finder, I kept wondering: who would The Night Drifter and Midnight Bride be about? I was thinking probably the doctor, Marius, with his tragic history, but Carroll surprised me.

The eldest son and heir to Castle Leger, Lance St. Leger is plagued by an infernal restlessness that cannot be appeased, perhaps because the family legacy of strange powers is most pronounced in Lance's own dubious gift. He calls it night drifting--his ability to spirit into the night while his body remains behind. And it is on one wild night that he finds Rosalind, a young, sheltered widow who mistakes Lance's "drifting" soul for the ghost of Sir Lancelot. Lance teases and tempts her, fills her with a yearning her chivalrous phantom knight cannot satisfy. But in this place imbued with both true love and otherworldly magic, a new dire portent vows to come full circle. As a murderous enemy challenges the St. Leger power, Rosalind must tempt magic herself to save her beloved from the cold depths of eternal damnation.

Yes, indeed, I was completely wrong. I very definitely wasn't expecting to go forward over 25 years and read about Anatole and Madeline's twin sons! And I wasn't expecting such a different tone, either. A good one, a B.

Lance St. Leger, the eldest of the twins by a few minutes, is a man used to disappointing everyone around him. But when on a Midsummer night he manages to lose the legendary St. Leger sword in the most stupid of ways (he gets mugged while wearing it as a prop for his knight costume), he knows this might be the last straw. He needs to get it back before his parents come back from their trip and find that only disaster can come from leaving Lance in charge of things.

Lance's gift is the ability to night drift (that is, at night, his spirit can drift out of his body as a kind of ghost and can move around, even going through solid objects, while his body rests where he left it), so he decides to use it to find the sword. And it is as a ghost, while searching the town's inn, that Lance meets young widow Rosalind Carlyon.

Of course, Lance can't reveal who or what he is to the woman, no matter how attractive he finds her, so he uses the fact that he's wearing his knight costume (his physical body was still wearing it when he lay down on his bed and drifted out) to convince her that he's the ghost of Lancelot du Lac. He even tells her an adaptation of the truth... that he's looking for Excalibur.

Lance doesn't think he'll ever meet Rosalind again, but wouldn't you know it? It turns out the Bride Finder decrees that she's his chosen bride, and so he ends up having to convince her to marry him. And it's a difficult job, because Rosalind is in love with the ghost of Sir Lancelot, and thinks Lance St. Leger, no matter how physically similar to her beloved, is a bit of a boor. The only thing he can talk her into is a marriage of convenience, and so Lance soon finds himself in love with his wife and competing against himself for her love.

If you're anything like me, you might be a little bit leery of a plot which depends on the heroine not noticing that her husband is the same person as this man she loves so much. Fortunately, Carroll makes it convincing. The very fact that Sir Lancelot is transparent while Lance is very definitely solid makes it understandable, but there's also the way the personalities of these two men seem so different. As Sir Lancelot, Lance is able to express his most chivalrous, noble impulses, those he's decided he's too jaded and cynical to have. And he's able to get Rosalind's love, something he feels unworthy of in his Lance identity.

Carroll was also very good in the way she wrote Rosalind's conflicted feelings, as she loves Sir Lancelot, but feels increasingly attracted to her husband, both physically and emotionally, when she begins to see the real man under the mask.

There's plenty of built-in conflict in their relationship: how will Rosalind resolve her ver conflicted feelings? What will her reaction be when she finds out about Lance's deception? But Carroll also writes a very interesting relationship between Lance and his brother Val, one that reminded me a little bit of that between Kit and Sydnam in Balogh's A Summer to Remember. It wasn't quite as deeply done as that one, but I liked how Carroll resolves Lance's guilt for being the unwitting cause of his brother's injury. Same thing with the relationship between Lance and his father. Anatole didn't immediately become the perfect father, and Lance has some very real doubts about his father's feelings for him, which are put to rest in a lovely scene at the end of the book.

There's also the whole deal about the stolen sword and Lance's friendship with Rafe Mortmain, the last descendant of his family's deadly enemies, but though this was interesting, I got the feeling too many things were left unresolved here. They're probably to be further developed in Lance's brother Val's story, Midnight Bride, which is right here waiting for me!