Beginning:
Cold Spring, 1899Friday 56:
Twelfth Night
"They say he's bankrupted himself rebuilding the house--all for her, of course." Carrie Rheinlander's voice carried along the high, arched ceiling. "And then there are those frightful stories about...oh, Janie, I didn't see you there."
No one ever did.
The official notice had arrived hours later, presented by a harried Mr. Tilden. It had been easier than Janie expected to pretend she knew nothing about it, largely because no one ever imagined she might. As always, she sat in a chair a little behind the others, draped in crepe and dullness. Janie Van Duyvil, who never did anything improper.
From New York Times bestselling author, Lauren Willig, comes this scandalous novel set in the Gilded Age, full of family secrets, affairs, and even murder.
Annabelle and Bayard Van Duyvil live a charmed life in New York: he's the scion of an old Knickerbocker family, she grew up in a Tudor manor in England, they had a whirlwind romance in London, they have three year old twins on whom they dote, and he's recreated her family home on the banks of the Hudson and renamed it Illyria. Yes, there are rumors that she's having an affair with the architect, but rumors are rumors and people will gossip. But then Bayard is found dead with a knife in his chest on the night of their Twelfth Night Ball, Annabelle goes missing, presumed drowned, and the papers go mad. Bay's sister, Janie, forms an unlikely alliance with a reporter to uncover the truth, convinced that Bay would never have killed his wife, that it must be a third party, but the more she learns about her brother and his wife, the more everything she thought she knew about them starts to unravel. Who were her brother and his wife, really? And why did her brother die with the name George on his lips?
