A Valiant Ignorance; Vol. 1 of 3a Novel in Three Volumes

In the dining room of a hotel in Nice, Hermia Romayne sits alone, composing her face into the serene mask of a woman of the world. But behind that mask, she carries a secret that could destroy everything. Her husband William, once a respected financier throughout Europe, has been exposed as a swindler. He took his own life rather than face the consequences, leaving Hermia to navigate the wreckage alone. Now she must face the judgment of society while hiding the full truth from her young son Julian, keeping him in what the title calls 'a valiant ignorance' , a protective lie that grows more difficult to maintain as the boy matures and begins to sense the shadows his mother works so hard to conceal. This is a Victorian novel about the Performances required of women, the weight of shame they carried for men's sins, and the particular cruelty of having to preserve a family's honor while knowing it was built on fraud.