The Winter Guests at Meriwether's
A Novel

About this book:

On a desolate stretch of the Suffolk coast, Meriwether's Hotel has shuttered its windows against the winter gales. The summer guests have fled, the staff is reduced to three—a sharp-eyed housemaid, a cook with hands like oak bark, and a gangling stable-boy—and the great flint house settles into its long, cold sleep. Then a carriage crunches up the drive in the November twilight, depositing a pale young barrister with a solicitor's letter, a trunk of law books, and a purpose he refuses to name.

Thomas Vance claims he needs only solitude to read for the bar. But the house has other occupants: the wind that screams down the chimneys like a wounded thing, the sea that rises nightly to lap the lower floorboards, and the keys—forty iron keys on a heavy ring—that Clara Finch carries like a rosary. Each unlocks a room folded in dust, a cellar banked against damp, a shuttered window behind which something might be watching. And in the locked gun-room under the east turret, the fowling pieces wait, oiled and ready, though no one has fired them in years.

As the frost hardens and the carrier's wagon fails to appear, the four strangers circle one another in the lamplit kitchen: the gentleman scholar with his Latin texts and his blue-veined wrists, the housemaid who knows every groan of the timbers, the cook who reads the weather in her knuckles, and the boy who sees gold watch-chains where he should see survival. Outside, the North Sea pounds the shingle, bringing wreckage and secrets ashore. Inside, the past is waking up—and it has the keys.