The Storrington Papers

For Sarah Goodwill, still reeling in the aftershock of a disastrous marriage, the position of secretary-ghostwriter to Major Charles Storrington seems the ideal opportunity to exorcise a few demons of her own. Sarah will help Major Storrington, confined to a wheelchair by the tank accident that finished a promising military career, to research and write the family history of the Storringtons, an armaments dynasty. She will also serve as governess to his small son. To her dismay, Sarah finds the menage at Maidenshall, the great Victorian mansion built on the site of a nunnery, a decidedly uneasy one: Elegant, lovely Cressida is patently unable to overcome the blow dealt her marriage by Charles's crippling. Bored, diversion-starved, she increasingly seeks escape in her London fashion career and, perhaps, in the arms of other men; Adolphus "Dolly" Storrington is lonely, distracted child who spends most of his waking hours in the company of a fantasy playmate who has entirely, almost unnaturally, possessed the boy's hyperactive imagination; The Major, handsome, still powerful, and restive in his wheelchair prison, alternates between bursts of creative energy and raging, frustration-provoked outbursts at his family, his servants, and even at Sarah, who is falling inexorably in love with him; And Henrietta Galloway, the nonagenarian retainer who wanders about Maidenshall unsettling whomever she encounters with her ramblings of days long past. As Sarah moves deeper into the family papers, she experiences a distinct sense of something unfinished, unresolved, about the Storringtons. But it is not until her research yields up two diaries out of Edwardian times that she discovers a fascinating family legend-the legend of Hannah Knox. In these two accounts-one innocently observing, the other eloquent with the pain of betrayal-Sarah learns of the illicit passion of that earlier governess for another Charles Storrington, and of its bitter aftermath..., ISBN13: B000JLJ0U6 ISBN10: B000JLJ0U6 Material Type: hardcover