The Wife in the Attic — Rose Lerner

Goldengrove's towers and twisted chimneys rose at the very edge of the peaceful Weald, a stone's throw from the poisonous marshes and merciless waters of Rye Bay. Young Tabby Palethorp had been running wild there ever since her mother grew too ill to leave her room.I was the perfect choice to give Tabby a good English education: thoroughly respectable and far too plain to tempt her lonely father, Sir Kit, to indiscretion.I knew better than to trust my new employer with the truth about my past. But knowing better couldn't stop me from yearning for impossible things: to be Tabby's mother, Sir Kit's companion, and Goldengrove's new mistress.All that belonged to poor Lady Palethorp. Most of all, I burned to finally catch a glimpse of her.Surely she could tell me who cut the strings on my guitar, why all the doors inside the house were locked after dark, and whose footsteps I heard in the night… It gave me nightmares…a furious, tender, aching, incisive masterpiece of a book. —Olivia Waite, author of The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics