Faithful Margaret: A Novel

The novel opens at a deathbed. Ethel Brand is dying, and Margaret Walsingham, her faithful companion, holds vigil through the long night. But Ethel's greatest sorrow is not her own end - it is the estrangement from her grandson, St. Udo, whose arrival she desperately hopes for before it's too late. Margaret, bound to this woman by years of devoted service, makes a silent prayer: let him come. Let her not die alone. But the dawn brings no St. Udo. And when Ethel finally passes, she leaves behind a will that traps Margaret in an impossible position. She is to marry Ethel's grandson - a man she has never met, a man who looks at her with contempt, who sees her as a fortune-hunter who connived her way into his grandmother's good graces. Margaret faces a choice no woman should have to make: accept a life built on resentment and obligation, or refuse and lose everything. Set against the rigid class structures of late Victorian England, this is a story about what it means to be faithful when faithfulness costs you everything - and whether loyalty to the dead can survive the demands of the living. For readers who savor the gothic undercurrents of Victorian sensation fiction and the quiet heroism of women navigating a world designed to unmake them.