Lady Audley's Secret
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Nov. 28, 2017)
"Lady Audley's Secret" book has a beautiful glossy cover and a blank page for the dedication. "Mr. Harcourt Talboys lived in a prim, square, red-brick mansion, within a mile of a little village called Grange Heath, in Dorsetshire. The prim, square, red-brick mansion stood in the center of prim, square grounds, scarcely large enough to be called a park, too large to be called anything else - so neither the house nor the grounds had any name, and the estate was simply designated Squire Talboys'. Perhaps Mr. Harcourt Talboys was the last person in this world with whom it was possible to associate the homely, hearty, rural old English title of squire. He neither hunted nor farmed. He had never worn crimson, pink, or top-boots in his life. A southerly wind and a cloudy sky were matters of supreme indifference to him, so long as they did not in any way interfere with his own prim comforts; and he only cared for the state of the crops inasmuch as it involved the hazard of certain rents which he received for the farms upon his estate. He was a man of about fifty years of age, tall, straight, bony and angular, with a square, pale face, light gray eyes, and scanty dark hair, brushed from either ear across a bald crown, and thus imparting to his physiognomy some faint resemblance to that of a terrier - a sharp, uncompromising, hard-headed terrier - a terrier not to be taken in by the cleverest dog-stealer who ever distinguished himself in his profession."