Editorial Content for Shadows of Ladenbrooke Manor

Artist Heather Toulson lives in current-day Portland, Oregon, spending her days in her studio recovering and restoring her clients’ damaged art treasures. She’s exceptionally gifted at taking a torn, water-stained or weakened painting and working at it until the damages cannot be seen any more. Her life is rather quiet, but she loves what she does ---  working alone to renew and beautify art that’s precious to its owners. Her only relationships are with her clients, her grown daughter Ella, and her museum friend Nick, who refers potential clients to her. Nick would like more than just a professional relationship, but she’s not quite sure she’s ready to risk love again.

Heather has recently lost her estranged father, Walter Doyle. Their relationship was strained and distant since she eloped with her husband-to-be during her college years, and moved halfway across the world from her birthplace of England. Unfortunately, her marriage didn’t last. But her relationship with her parents was never repaired; her mother died, and now her father has also passed. Their family cottage in England has been vacant for a while, and to prepare it to sell, Heather and Ella travel there to clean it, go through her parents’ things, and get it ready for new owners. But the family home isn’t all that Heather has left behind, and her trip will open doors that she’d never expected to see again --- and reveal family secrets she never knew existed.

"Melanie Dobson’s magical story of the lives and loves of the Doyle women, and the healing that finally comes for them, is a beautiful tale of the redemption that can happen even when we’re not consciously looking for it."

Fifty years earlier, Heather’s forebear, Maggie, is pregnant, single, and without hope or options in a tiny town on the coast of England, off the Bristol Channel. It’s a town where everyone’s secrets are known by everyone else, and spread by those looking for the next salacious story. The baby’s father, who doesn’t even know he’s a father, is long gone. Her only option seems to be slipping off the pier into a stormy ocean. But rescue appears at the last moment --- in the form of young Walter Doyle, who has loved Maggie from a distance for years. He proposes, and marries her, all without knowing the secret she carries in her womb.

But secrets do have a way of coming to light. Maggie’s, and baby Lilly’s, are suddenly revealed to Walter…and to the rest of their small town. Hoping to ease Walter’s bitterness and start anew where nobody knows them or their story, they find employment in the Cotswolds alongside the manor and gardens of Ladenbrooke. Apart from Walter’s inner struggles, the family finds happiness there. And Lilly begins to grow. Yet things don’t seem to be quite right with Lilly. She is solitary, and shaken by loud noises or casual touch. School is regularly a challenge for her, both scholastically and relationally. In 1950s England, nobody knows quite what to do with her.

However, Lilly enjoys a private world of beauty. She dances among the flowers of the manor’s gardens. She is enchanted by the blossoms and the butterflies there. The son of the manor family, Oliver, befriends her. And she discovers the delight of creating with paint and paper. But neither of them knows that devastation --- and murder --- will cloud the happy future they’re imagining together.

How long do generational secrets get handed down --- and repeat themselves --- in a family? Even when the secrets aren’t fully known, they can exert influence and bring repercussions on the lives of parents, children and grandchildren. Melanie Dobson’s magical story of the lives and loves of the Doyle women, and the healing that finally comes for them, is a beautiful tale of the redemption that can happen even when we’re not consciously looking for it. Don’t miss this lovely story of life and tragedy…and the hope that can follow when we least expect it.