Castle Barebane

by Joan Aiken

Near the top of a three-hundred-foot crag perched a roofless ruin with crumbling battlements and shattered buttresses....Apart from the ruined castle there seemed to be no other sign of human life, unless you counted a couple of fishing boats well out to sea.... Val Montgomery, young, warm-hearted, and confident -- but no lady, according to the grande dames of New York in the 1880's -- had abandoned a promising job on a newspaper and a claustrophobic engagement to a society lawyer and sailed to England to help her spendthrift half-brother, Nils, whose Scottish heiress wife, Kirstie, had fallen ill. Arrived in a London terrorized by a series of lurid murders, Val can find no trace of Nils or Kirstie. Horrified, she discovers that her small nephew and niece seem to have been callously abandoned in a London slum. Seeking a safe domicile for the children, Val travels to Edinburgh, intending to leave them with their mother's old nurse at Ardnacarrig, the family home on the Scottish coast --