Review
------
"Gosh. I loved everything about this book -- the setting,
the characters, the plot, the dialogue, the denouement. You know
how some books just grab you by the hair and don't let go until
you reach their extremely satisfying conclusion? That was
Mariana, for me." - Bookfoolery and Babble
"The historical context, as always, is first-rate. [Kearsley]
evokes the tone and rhythm of earlier speech without using
dialect, and demarcates the different eras' worldviews subtly,
through language and characterization. And oh, that ending. It's
why I read romance." - Dear Author
"Susanna Kearsley is an impressive and detailed storyteller - I
look forward to reading more of her books very soon. This is one
that went above and beyond any and all expectations I had before
starting." - Ageless Pages Reviews
"I would highly recommend this book to romance lovers and
paranormal romance lovers alike. It was a great lighthearted book
that kept me on the edge of my seat; I didn't want to put it
down." - Just Loomin' N' Readin'
"I had a lot of fun reading this-and the romance was stunning." -
Shelf Love
"After reading Mariana I am officially a Susanna Kearsley fan! I
will read anything she writes from now on. Mariana was such a
beautiful, well-researched novel." - The Sweet Bookshelf
"I loved everything about this book from the very beginning." -
The Book Garden
"Each page left me in anticipation of the next and I often had to
force myself to put the book down. Kearsley has created a novel
full of mystery, intrigue, and timeless romance. With unexpected
twists and turns throughout, the ending was so unpredictable and
surprising! And I admit, this one even evoked a few tears...in a
very good way! I absolutely loved this novel and my overall
rating is FIVE stars. Highly recommended." - A Novel Affair
"I loved every minute of it, and even when I thought I knew what
the ending was, Ms. Kearsley pulled the rug right out from under
me. I did not see that coming, but I absolutely loved it. Bravo.
I want more." - At Home with a Good Book and the Cat
"Mariana is a beautiful and poignant tale of lost love, haunting
and humbling. Whether you believe in past lives or not, this tale
will make you yearn for an experience like Julia Beckett's.
Romantic, passionate, and bittersweet, this intelligent,
tension-laden story will sweep you away." - HIstorical Novels
Review
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About the Author
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Susanna Kearsley's writing has been compared to Mary Stewart,
Daphne Du Maurier, and Diana Gabaldon. Her books have been
translated into several languages, selected for the Mystery
Guild, condensed for Reader's Digest, and optioned for film. She
lives in Canada near the shores of Lake Ontario.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Chapter 1
I first saw the house in the summer of my fifth birthday.
It was all the fault of a poet, and the fact that our weekend
visit with a favorite elderly aunt in Exeter had put my her in
a vaguely poetic mood. Faced with an unexpected fork in the road
on our drive home to Oxford, he deliberately chose the left
turning instead of the right. "The road less traveled by," he
told us, in a benign and dreamy voice. And as the poet had
promised, it did indeed make all the difference.
To begin with, we became lost. So hopelessly lost, in fact, that
my mother had to put away the . The clouds that rolled in to
cover the sun seemed only an extension of my her's darkening
mood, all poetry forgotten as he hunched grimly over the steering
wheel. By lunchtime it was raining, quite heavily, and my mother
had given sweets to my brother Tommy and me in a vain attempt to
keep us from further irritating Daddy, whose notable temper was
nearing the breaking point.
The sweets were peppermint, striped pink and white like large
marbles, and so effective at hindering speech that we had to take
them out of our mouths altogether in order to talk to each other.
By the time we reached the first cluster of village shops and
houses, my face and hands were sticky with sugar, and the front
of my new ruffled frock was a stained and d ruin.
I've never been entirely certain what it was that made my her
stop the car where he did. I seem to remember a cat darting
across the road in front of us, but that may simply have been the
invention of an imaginative and overtired child. Whatever the
reason, the car stopped, the engine stalled, and in the ensuing
commotion I got my first watery glimpse of the house.
It was a rather ordinary old farmhouse, large and square and
solid, set back some distance from the road with a few unkempt
trees dotted around for privacy. Its darkly glistening slate roof
sloped down at an alarming angle to meet the weathered gray stone
walls, the drab monotony of color broken by twin redbrick
chimneys and an abundance of large multipaned windows, their
frames painted freshly white.
I was pressing my nose against the cold glass of the car window,
straining to get a better look, when after a few particularly
virulent oaths my her managed to coax the engine back to life.
My mother, obviously relieved, turned round to check up on us.
"Julia, don't," she pleaded. "You'll leave smears on the
windows."
"That's my house," I said, by way of explanation.
My brother Tommy pointed to a much larger and more stately home
that was just coming into view. "Well, that's my house," he
countered, triumphant. To the delight of my parents, we continued
the game all the way home to Oxford, and the lonely gray house
was forgotten.
I was not to see it again for seventeen years.
That summer, the summer that I turned twenty-two, is strong in
my memory. I had just graduated from art school, and had landed
what seemed like the perfect job with a small advertising firm in
London. My brother Tom, three years older than myself, had
recently come down from Oxford with a distinguished academic
record, and promptly shocked the family by announcing his plans
to enter the Anglican ministry. Ours was not a particularly
religious family, but Tom jokingly maintained that, given his
name, he had little choice in the matter. "Thomas Beckett! I ask
you," he had teased my mother. "What else could you expect?"
To celebrate what we perceived to be our coming of age, Tom and
I decided to take a short holiday on the south Devon coast, where
we could temporarily forget about parents and responsibilities
and take advantage of the uncommonly hot and sunny weather with
which southern England was being blessed. We were not
disappointed. We spent a blissful week lounging about on the
beach at Torquay, and emerged relaxed, rejuvenated, and sunburnt.
Tom, caught up on a rising swell of optimism, appointed me
navigator for the trip back. He should have known better. While
I'm not exactly bad with s, I am rather easily distracted by
the scenery. Inevitably, we found ourselves off the main road,
toiling through what seemed like an endless procession of tiny,
identical villages linked by a narrow road so overhung by trees
it had the appearance of a tunnel.
After the seventh village, Tom me an accusing sideways
look. We had both inherited our mother's Cornish coloring and
finely cut features, but while on me the combination of dark hair
and eyes was more impish than exotic, on Tom it could look
positively menacing when he chose.
"Where do you suppose we are?" he asked, with dangerous
politeness.
I dutifully consulted the . "Wiltshire, I expect," I told him
brightly. "Somewhere in the middle."
"Well, that's certainly specific."
"Look," I suggested, as we approached village number eight, "why
don't you stop being so pigheaded and ask directions at the next
pub? Honestly, Tom, you're as bad as Dad-" The word ended in a
sudden squeal.
This time, I didn't imagine it. A large ginger cat dashed right
across the road, directly in front of our car. The brakes
shrieked a protest as Tom put his foot to the floor, and then,
right on cue, the engine died.
"Damn and blast!"
"Curates can't use language like that," I reminded my brother,
and he grinned involuntarily.
"I'm getting it out of my system," was his excuse.
Laughing, I looked out the window and froze.
"I don't believe it."
"I know," my brother agreed. "Rotten luck."
I shook my head. "No, Tom, look-it's my house."
"What?"
"My gray house," I told him. "Don't you remember, that day the
cat ran onto the road and Daddy stalled the car?"
"No."
"On the way back from Auntie Helen's," I elaborated. "Just after
my fifth birthday. It was raining and Daddy took the wrong
turning and a cat ran onto the road and he had to stop the car."
My brother looked at me in the same way a scientist must look at
a curious new specimen, and shook his head.
"No, I don't remember that."
"Well, it happened," I said stubbornly, "and the car stalled
just here, and I saw that house."
"If you say so."
The car was running again now, and Tom maneuvered it over to the
side of the road so I could have a clearer view.
"What do you think it means?" I asked.
"I think it means our family has bloody bad luck with cats in
Wiltshire," Tom said. I chose to ignore him.
"I wonder how old it is."
Tom leaned closer. "Elizabethan, I should think. Possibly
Jacobean. No later."
I'd forgotten that Tom had been keen on architecture at school.
Besides, Tom always knew everything.
"I'd love to get a closer look." My voice was hopeful, but Tom
merely sent me an indulgent glance before turning back onto the
road that led into the village.
"I am not," he said, "going to peer into anyone's windows to
satisfy your curiosity. Anyway, the drive is clearly marked
‘Private.'"
A short distance down the road we pulled into the car park of
the Red Lion, a respectable half-timbered pub with an ancient
thatched roof and tables arranged on a makeshift terrace to
accommodate the noontime crowd. I stayed in the car, preparing to
take my shift as driver, while Tom went into the pub to down a
quick pint and get directions back to the main road.
I was so busy pondering how great the odds must be against being
lost twice in the same spot, that I completely forgot to ask my
brother to find out the name of the village we were in.
It would be another eight years before I found myself once again
in Exbury, Wiltshire.
***
This time, the final time, it was early April, two months shy of
my thirtieth birthday, and-for once-I was not lost. I still lived
in London, in a tiny rented flat in Bloomsbury that I had become
rooted to, in spite of an unexpectedly generous legacy left to me
by my her's aunt Helen, that same aunt we'd been visiting in
Exeter all those years earlier. She'd only seen me twice, had
Auntie Helen, so why she had chosen to leave me such an obscene
a of money remained a mystery. Perhaps it was because I was
the only girl in a family known for its male progeny. Auntie
Helen, according to my her, had been possessed of staunchly
feminist views. "A room of your own," Tom had told me, in a
decided tone. "That's what she's left you. Haven't you read
Virginia Woolf?"
It was rather more than the price of a room, actually, but I
hadn't the slightest idea what to do with it. Tom had stoutly
refused my offer to share the inheritance, and my parents
maintained they had no need of it, being comfortably well-off
themselves since my her's retirement from surgical practice.
So that was that.
I had quite enough to occupy my time, as it was, having shifted
careers from graphic design to illustration, a field I found both
more interesting and more lucrative. By some stroke of luck I had
been teamed early on with a wonderfully talented author, and our
collaboration on a series of fantasy tales for children had
earned me a respectable name for myself in the business, not to
mention a steady living. I had just that week been commissioned
to illustrate a sizable new collection of legends and fairy tales
from around the world, a project that excited me greatly and
promised to keep me busily employed for the better part of a
year. I was on top of the world.
Ordinarily, I'd have celebrated my good fortune with my family,
but since my parents were halfway round the world on holiday and
Tom was occupied with Easter services, I had settled for the next
best thing and spent the weekend with friends in Bath. On the
Monday morning, finding the traffic on the main road too busy for
my taste, I detoured to the north and followed the gentle sweep
of the Kennet River towards London.
It was a cool but perfect spring day, and the trees that lined
the road were bursting into leaf with an almost tropical fervor.
In honor of the season, I drove with the windows down, and the
air smelled sweetly of rain and soil and growing things.
My arthritic but trustworthy Peugeot crested a small hill with a
protesting wheeze. Gathering speed, I negotiated a broad curve
where the road dipped down into a shallow valley before crossing
over the Kennet via a narrow stone bridge. As I bumped across the
bridge, I felt a faint tingling sensation sweep across the back
of my neck, and my fingers tightened on the wheel in
anticipation.
The most surprising thing was that I wasn't at all surprised,
this time, to see the house. Somehow, I almost expected it to be
there.
I slowed the car to a crawl, then pulled off the road and
stopped altogether, just site the long gravel drive. A large
ginger cat stalked haughtily across the road without so much as
glancing at me, and disappeared into the waving grass. Three
times in one lifetime, I told myself, even without the cat, was
definitely beyond the bounds of ordinary coincidence.
Surely, I reasoned, whoever owned the house wouldn't mind
terribly if I just took a casual peek around...? As I hesitated,
biting my lip, a flock of starlings rose in a beating cloud from
the field beside me, gathered and wheeled once above the gray
stone house, and then was gone.
For me, that was the deciding factor. Along with my mother's
looks, I had also inherited the superstitious nature of her
Cornish ancestors, and the starlings were a good-luck omen of my
own invention. From my earliest childhood, whenever I had seen a
flock of them it meant that something wonderful was about to
happen. My brother Tom repeatedly tried to point out the flaw in
this belief, by reminding me that starlings in the English
countryside were not exactly uncommon, and that their link to my
happiness could only be random at best. I remained unconvinced. I
only knew that the starlings had never steered me wrong, and
watching them turn now and rise above the house, I suddenly made
a decision.
I grabbed my shapeless green anorak from the seat beside me and
stepped out of the car, nearly tumbling into the ditch in my
eagerness. I wasn't exactly dressed to go visiting, I admitted,
tugging the anorak on over my jeans and rough sweater-but that
couldn't be helped. I ran a hand through my hair in a hopeless
attempt to smooth the short, unruly curls, but the damply blowing
wind spoiled my efforts.
Now, I thought, what excuse to use? Directions? A glass of
water? Trouble with the car? I glanced back at the dented and
battered Peugeot and nodded. Car trouble, I decided. Anyone would
believe that. Mentally rehearsing my lines, I crossed the road
and started up the gravel drive. A cracked and weathered
signboard bearing the words "Strictly Private" in faded red paint
hung dejectedly from a nail in a nearby tree. Undaunted, I
soldiered on, hoping that my footsteps didn't sound as
crunchingly loud to the people inside as they did to my own ears.
The house looked exactly as I remembered it-the same red
chimneys with their clay chimney pots; the same symmetrically
positioned white windows, four panes over four; the same
rough-hewn gray stone walls under the steep slate roof. The only
thing different was the door. I had always imagined it to be
brown, but now I saw that it was clearly dark green, standing out
in sharp contrast to the massive stone portal that surrounded it.
My knocking echoed heavily with a dull and hollow sound. Three
times I d my knuckles against the heavy wood, before
finally conceding that no one was coming to answer the door.
Which meant there was nobody home. And, I told myself happily,
since there was nobody home, it followed that no one would be
disturbed if I went round to the back of the house and looked in
a few windows. Having thus rationalized my trespassing, I
retraced my steps to the drive and followed it round the north
side of the house.
Here the drive ended abruptly at a squat, low-slung stone
building with a weedy thatched roof. Presumably this had once
been the stables, but the bumper of a car protruding from one of
the open stalls left no doubt as to its present use.
The view from where I stood, looking across the level farmlands
and gently undulating downs, broken here and there by clusters of
dark-green trees and wild shrubs, was truly beautiful. There was
no yard as such, although a tumbled heap of stone a hundred feet
or so behind the house looked as if it might once have been part
of a boundary wall. And though I had counted three oaks, a fruit
tree, and several shrubs at the front, the only bit of vegetation
growing close against the back wall of the house was a solitary
poplar with gnarled bark, its silvery-green branches trembling in
the breeze.
There was another dark-green door here, with an old-fashioned
latch, and another double row of white-painted windows. Beneath
what I assumed must be the kitchen window, someone had piled a
precarious stack of ancient flowerpots, their sides encrusted
with thick black moss from lack of use. I stretched on tiptoe and
leaned closer, cupping one hand against the glass to shield my
eyes against the reflected glare of the sun. It was a window to
the kitchen, or perhaps the pantry. I could just make out a shelf
of tinned goods and an old porcelain sink. I was angling my head
for a better look when a man's voice spoke suddenly out of the
air behind me.
"He's not there."
It was a friendly voice, with a faintly un-English burr to it,
and had come from some distance away. But I didn't register any
of that immediately. I spun round, startled, and sent the pile of
flowerpots cing to the ground.
At first I could see no one, but as I stood there staring, the
figure of a man detached itself from the tumbled stone wall and
came across the grass towards me. He was a young man, perhaps
five years my senior, dressed in rough working clothes and
wearing leather gauntlets that looked oddly medieval and out of
place.
"I didn't mean to frighten you," he apologized. "I just thought,
if you're looking for Eddie, he's not there."
He was quite close now, close enough for me to clearly see the
combination of auburn hair and flint-gray eyes that is, somehow,
so distinctively Scottish. He smiled, a friendly smile that
matched the voice.
"Are you a friend of Eddie's?" he asked.
I shook my head.
"A relative, then."
"No." To my credit, I blushed a little. I had a hunch my tale of
phony car trouble would not make it past those shrewd gray eyes.
"No, I don't know the owner. Will he be back soon, do you know?"
The man tilted his head to one side and gave me a long,
measuring look that rather reminded me of my brother.
"I hope not," he said evenly. "We buried him last month."
"Oh, I'm sorry." I blushed deeper. "I really am sorry."
"No harm done." He shrugged. "You're just having a poke about,
then?"
My face, by this time, was crimson, and I had a feeling that he
was enjoying my obvious discomfort. It took a moment, but the
full importance of what he'd just told me finally sank in, and I
abruptly forgot my embarrassment.
I lifted my eyes quickly. "Is the house for sale, then?"
"Aye. Did you want to have a look at it?"
"I want to buy it. I've waited twenty-five years for this
house."
The man raised a russet eyebrow, and for some absurd reason I
found myself babbling out the whole story of "The House and I,"
to which he listened with admirable patience. I can't imagine he
found it very interesting. When I'd finished my childish
narrative, his level gaze met mine for a second time, and the
resemblance to my brother was even more pronounced.
"Well, then," he said solemnly, "you'd best see Mr. Ridley in
the High Street. I've not got my own keys with me, or I'd show
you round myself." He stripped off one gauntlet and extended a
hand in greeting. "I'm Iain Sumner, by the way."
"Julia Beckett." I must have altered my expression at the
of his hand, because he smiled again, looking down at the tiny
lacerations marring his skin.
"Brambles," he explained. "They'd choke out my garden if I
didn't thin them back. It's not painful," he assured me, pulling
the glove back on. "I'd best be getting back to my work. Good
luck with the house."
"Thank you," I said, but he was already out of ear.
Five minutes later I was sitting in the offices of Ridley and
Stewart, Estate Agents. I confess I don't remember much about
that afternoon. I do recall a confusing blur of conversation,
with Mr. Ridley rambling on about legal matters, conveyances and
searches and the like, but I wasn't really listening.
"You're quite certain," Mr. Ridley had asked me, "that you don't
want to view the property first?"
"I've seen it," I'd assured him. To be honest, there seemed no
need for such formalities. It was, after all, my house. My house.
I was still hugging the knowledge tightly, as a child hugs a
present, when I knocked on the door of the rectory of St.
Stephen's, Elderwel, Hampshire, that evening.
"Congratulate me, Vicar." I beamed up at my brother's startled
face. "We're practically neighbors. I just bought a house in
Wiltshire."
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