Snow had fallen in the night, and now the great house, standing at the head of the valley, seemed like a five-hundred-year old ship sailing in a white ocean… For the Cavendish family, Rutherford Park is much more than a place to call home. It is a way of life marked by rigid rules and lavish rewards, governed by unspoken desires… Lady of the house Octavia Cavendish lives like a bird in a gilded cage. With her family’s fortune, her husband, William, has made significant additions to the estate, but he too feels bound—by the obligations of his title as well as his vows. Their son, Harry, is expected to follow in his footsteps, but the boy has dreams of his own, like pursuing the new adventure of aerial flight. Meanwhile, below stairs, a housemaid named Emily holds a secret that could undo the Cavendish name. On Christmas Eve 1913, Octavia catches a glimpse of her husband in an intimate moment with his beautiful and scandalous distant cousin. She then spies the housemaid Emily out in the snow, walking toward the river, about to make her own secret known to the world. As the clouds of war gather on the horizon, an epic tale of longing and betrayal is about to unfold at Rutherford Park…
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“Cooke paints deeply emotional, three-dimensional portraits of both upstairs and downstairs inhabitants, all of whom are both comforted by and resentful of their prescribed and proscribed roles in the manor home’s centuries-old history.”
— RT Book Reviews (4 stars)
“A breathtakingly beautiful book.”
— Kate Furnivall, author of The Russian Concubine“Beautiful, melancholy and richly detailed.”
— Natasha Solomons, author of The House at TynefordBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Elizabeth Cooke lives in Dorset in southern England and is the author of twelve novels, among them the international bestseller The Ice Child.
Elizabeth Sastre has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Bed Rest by Sarah Bilston, Brick Lane by Monica Ali, and The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde, which was an AudioFile Best Audiobook of the Year in 2004.