The Silver Swan

by Deryn Lake Book 2 in the Sutton Place Trilogy series.

First published 1984

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4.1(198)

The second Sutton Place novel follows later generations of the Weston family as the curse associated with the manor appears to tighten around John Weston, the last male descendant of his line, and his daughter Melior Mary. The Long Gallery is haunted by the memory of Giles the Fool, while descendants of the astrologer Dr Zachary are again drawn into the family’s attempts to explain repeated catastrophe.

The story moves into the world of Jacobite loyalty and romantic intrigue, bringing Melior Mary into the orbit of Charles Edward Stuart and the dynastic hopes surrounding the Stuarts in exile. Private desire and political allegiance become another way for the old house to exert pressure on its owners. By placing eighteenth-century characters inside a family legend born in 1051, the novel turns inheritance into both a material estate and a burden of supernatural expectation.