The dark angel

Martha Morgan is eighteen years old, pregnant and suicidal. She has just suffered the trauma of a shotgun marriage, and now she finds herself in a strange house high on the slopes of a bleak mountain. She has to learn how to survive in this alien environment, surrounded by a group of eccentric family members and servants who are still recovering from the loss of five family members in a tragic fire. Against the odds, Martha does survive, learning in the process that she is protected by a group of very unlikely angels and that the mountain has a magical quality which insinuates itself into her soul. She is very beautiful, and that is both her blessing and her curse. So she makes enemies as well as friends, and as the story builds towards its climax she discovers some unpleasant truths about the family's past, and suffers from humiliation and brutality when she is attacked from all sides by those whom she has sought to befriend. Her most implacable enemy is a manservant with a very unsavoury past, whose sole ambition is to possess her and then destroy her.