The Secrets of Elloughton Park
Personal journals from the Georgian era fall into the lap of history professor James Postlewaite. Found in Elloughton Park, a Nottinghamshire country house that was converted into a hotel and conference center, the journals were written by Lord Corbyn Carlisle and his wife. Also found are notebooks from kitchen maid Ginny Farmer, raised in the Bristol Foundling Hospital until she went into service as a teenager, and a heart-shaped pendant bearing the initials A and N plus a scratched M.
With the help of history student Grace Farmer, James pieces together Corbyn’s story as the third son in the Carlisle line, his education and rise from a junior to a legal advocate and his unexpected assumption of the Carlisle title and oversight of the estate, as well as Ginny’s remarkable life after she was attacked and impregnated by the head of her household, banished from service, and fended for herself on the streets and later in the drawing rooms of London.
Characters are sharply drawn; even minor ones display aftereffects of events from the period in which they live. True to the title, a cipher in Corbyn’s journal hides one secret; the pendant resolves another.
Both the Georgian and present-day tales unfold gradually, like a trail of breadcrumbs, leaving readers hungry for each morsel along the way.
