The Ghost
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: eBook
ISBN-13: 9780307566898
Description: With a wife he loves and an exciting London-based career, architect Charles Waterston's  life seems in perfect balance. Nothing in his comfortable existence prepares him  for the sudden end to his ten-year marriage--or his unwanted transfer to his firm's  New York office. With nothing left to lose, Charlie takes a leave of absence from  his job to drive through New England, hoping to make peace with himself. Christmas  is approaching when Charlie leaves New York, heading to Vermont to ski. But a sudden,  blinding snowstorm strands him in a small Massachusetts town. There, as if by chance,  Charlie meets an elderly widow who offers to rent him her most precious possession:  a remote, exquisite lakeside chateau. Hidden deep in the woods, it once belonged  to a woman who lived and died there two centuries before. Her name was Sarah Ferguson.  And from the moment Charlie sets foot inside the chateau's graceful depths, he feels  her presence, and longs to know more about the life she led. It is Christmas Eve  when Charlie first glimpses her, a beautiful young woman with jet black hair. He  thinks it is a neighbor playing a joke on him, until he finds her diaries hidden  away in an old trunk. As he begins to turn the brittle, dusty pages, Sarah Ferguson  comes alive. Intrigued and unafraid, Charlie immerses himself in the diaries, eager  to learn more about the woman for whom the house was built. Sarah's first entry is  dated 1789, the year she arrived in America. Without self-pity or sentiment, she  writes of her harrowing journey from her native England, having fled the brutality  of her aristocratic husband. Settling in Massachusetts, Sarah finds an unfamiliar  land seething with the turbulence of the Indian wars. Determined to start a new life  in the vast new world, Sarah finds freedom--and danger--as she builds her home in the  wilderness and meets a man who will transform her life. His name is Francois de Pellerin,  a French nobleman adopted by Indians and drawn into the battle for the growing nation.  Their fateful union is a testament to a love so powerful it reaches across the centuries.  And for Charlie Waterston, caught between Sarah's world and his own, their story  is a gift--one that gives him the courage to let go of his past, and the freedom to  grasp a future that is right before his eyes.From the Paperback edition.