The Blackwood Bequest

Eleanor Blackwood is dead: found at her desk in Nethermoor House, pen in hand, a letter unfinished. Her will leaves the house, its debts and its very particular household arrangements to relations she may have met once, or never, chosen with unsettling precision. She leaves no explanation for the locked library, the portrait gallery that is subtly and systematically wrong, or the groundskeeper who flinches whenever anyone mentions the well-house. In the starving winter of 1699 the family’s founder bought two centuries of prosperity from something older than the family name, and once a generation the account is settled with a willing signature that quietly unwrites its signer from the world. Eleanor was this cycle’s overseer. Her death has started a clock the heirs did not know was ticking, and a society of the town’s founding families means to see the ledger signed on schedule, by someone else’s daughter if not by a Blackwood.