The Painted Fan
The fan is famous. The bride who carried it never existed.
For thirty years, Carroway House has built its history around one exquisite painted fan and the woman who supposedly carried it out of Bath in 1816. Louisa Sedley eloped with a naval officer, crossed the Atlantic, and founded the Charleston family whose fortune still supports the house.
At least, that is the story.
Antiques appraiser Susan Stewart finds the problem in under an hour.
The catalog card proves nothing. The celebrated 1889 receipt never names Louisa Sedley. And the story everyone has repeated for generations was invented decades after the fan changed hands.
Then the genealogist who discovered the same lie dies on an operating table.
Now Susan has eleven days to determine whether a two-hundred-year-old marriage ever happened. A hurricane is bearing down on Charleston, a probate judge is waiting for her opinion, and four hundred thousand dollars a year in trust distributions depends on the answer.
The woman who has kept the family accounts for nineteen years has decided Susan will not be the one to prove it.
And everything may come down to one tiny mark hidden in painted silk.
Period mourning marks record only two things:
Initials. And a date.
Someone gave Louisa Sedley a marriage she never had. Someone has been profiting from it since 1971. And after two centuries, the evidence has finally reached someone willing to read it correctly.
For readers of Kate Morton, Susanna Kearsley, and Barbara Erskine, and for anyone who has ever wondered what a museum label is actually resting on.
THE PAINTED FAN is an atmospheric dual-timeline historical mystery set in Charleston and Regency Bath, and Book Four in The Objects Remember Mysteries.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
