The Last Season at Harewood
A Novel of a House Falling Down

About this book:

Rain seeps through the stone of Harewood House like grief, and the post no longer smells of tobacco and lavender—it smells of pulp paper, iron-gall ink, and the cold calculus of the Inland Revenue. In the drafty morning room, the seventy-two-year-old Countess draws pencil lines across foolscap, dividing her ancestral home into columns of value: carpets, pictures, the nursery fire-irons rusted through at the back. Thirty-four years at her side, Martha Clague watches the Countess count teaspoons against probate, serve tea brewed with damp coal, and face the valuer's mark with a spine straightened by whalebone and habit. This is the last season of a world measured in silver-gilt and stiff blue letters.

Belowstairs, the servants' hall hums with quiet panic. Cook knows Her Ladyship will taste the lukewarm water; the yard boy reports the coal stack has taken the rain; young Arthur delivers mail on a bicycle missing its mudguard. From the linen closet to the long gallery, every room holds an inventory of memory—whispers in the servants' hall, dust on the velvet, secrets the house has kept for two hundred years. As the auction catalogue takes shape and the coronation spring brings a visitor from the city, the estate's final reckoning approaches: not with a bang, but with the dull thud of a pencil dropping onto worn carpet.

Elegiac and razor-observed, *The Last Season at Harewood* is a novel of a house falling down—and the women who hold it upright until the very last gate closes. For readers who loved *The Remains of the Day* and *Downton Abbey*, this is the story of what remains when the men are gone, the taxes come due, and history demands its pound of flesh.