But World War I upends the destinies of the Hartford clan. Their father, Frederick, the second son, is an automobile pioneer. Hannah, her sister Emmeline and brother David occasionally visit Riverton, owned by their uncle, Lord Ashbury. Why did Grace’s mother, herself a servant at Riverton before leaving under a cloud, send her 14-year-old daughter to work there? Who is Grace’s father? The domestic servant is a convenient expository device: Grace can eavesdrop on every Hartford family crisis. Extended flashbacks excavate the mysteries that surround Grace almost from the first.
Grace, a prominent former archeologist, is living out her waning years in a British nursing home, when an American filmmaker, Ursula, asks her to consult on a movie about the scandalous 1924 suicide of a poet during a lavish soirée at Riverton, a country estate where Grace once served as parlor maid to the Hartford family. In Australian author Morton’s atmospheric first novel, a 98-year-old woman recollects her unwitting role in a fatal deception.
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