Molly Keane

Friday's child is loving and giving. Juliet had devoted her life to the care of crippled and deprived children. But when she left London to work in the South of France, the phrase was to take on a deeper meaning. For Julia's new life was to bring her too much love, and too much pain, when she fell in love with a man who belonged to someone else. Juliet had always thought of love as a sacred bond and of marriage as an oath she would never break -- and she promised herself she would never love a married man. That was until she met Lucien de Maureville -- a gentle husband betrayed by a faithless wife and a lonely, tormented man caught between Juliet's budding love and a promise she hoped never to break.

Jessica and Jane have been living together for six months and are devoted friends - or are they? Jessica loves her friend with the cruelty of total possessiveness; Jane is rich, silly, and drinks rather too many brandy-and-sodas. Watching from the sidelines, their friend Sylvester regrets that Jane should be 'loved and bullied and perhaps even murdered by that frightful Jessica', but decides it's none of his business. When the Irish gentleman George Playfair meets Jane, however, he thinks otherwise and entices her to Ireland where the battle for her devotion begins.

One glorious gothic mansion - Garonlea - and two rather different ladies who would be Queen . . . Lady Charlotte French-McGrath has successfully ruled over her family with a rod of iron until the arrival of Cynthia: beautiful, young, talented, selfish - and engaged to her son Desmond. When Cynthia enters the Jazz Age, on the surface her life passes in a whirl of hunting, drinking and romance. But the ghosts of Garonlea are only biding their time: they know the source of their power, a secret handed on from one generation to the next.