Lucas is forced to muck about in the Blastburn sewers scavenging for valuables. Of course, after Midnight Court and the churlish Sir Randolph Grimsby go up in flames one night, Anna-Marie is reduced to working in the mill where she clashes with the extortion ring leader Bludward (who gets around in a steam driven wheelchair). And the source of Grimsby's fortune, the Midnight Mill boasts, in addition to the usual horrors of child labor and workers' oppression, a peculiarly nasty feature known as the pressing room, where a giant press sticks wool to inferior grade carpets and occasionally crushes children too slow to get out of its way. constructed a scientific instrument for measuring the depth of potholes"). The Grimsby mansion at Midnight Court houses not one, but two unjustly disinherited orphans, Lucas Bell and the French-speaking Anna-Marie (she a daughter of Midnight Court's talented, but improvident former owner, Sir Denzil Murgatroyd who "while still at college. Here Joan Aiken follows all the conventions of Dickensian fiction with just a little extra to satisfy jaded contemporary tastes. Dickens would enjoy this book, and so will Aiken fans who have been waiting for a full-scale 19th century novel ever since The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and its successors.
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