Before all this, a curiosity shop mysterious appears in the nearby town when Ann is shopping to impress the king and queen and she buys Dutch silent companions, which are wooden boards with painted people on them. So Ann kills her to save the remaining family members who are not at the manor and Ann gets the blame for all the dead bodies found and burned as a witch. Things at The Bridge manor start going wrong rapidly with pretty much everyone in the house getting killed off by Hetta. Hetta, who is named after the queen, befriends a gypsy boy and when the queen’s horse is found dead, the gypsy boy gets hanged and his sister is found drowned. Anne’s superstitious husband disliked his daughter’s disability and kept her hidden away when Charles 1st and his wife visit the Bainbridge manor house, The Bridge. In that time where ordinary women and herbalists were called witches, she made a herbal potion and got pregnant with a daughter who was mute, Hetta. One in the 17th century and one in the 19th century.Īnn Bainbridge in the 17th century has two sons and the doctors tell her she can never have another child, but she always wanted a daughter. Laura Purcell has excelled in nailing the horror genre with elements of Victorian gothic, frightening wooden board dolls, incarcerations in asylums, plenty of mysterious deaths down the generations and all down to an evil 17th century girl born of supposed witchcraft. This will end up being a classic ghost story on par with ‘The Woman in Black’ by Susan Hill.

The silent companions review