Synopses & Reviews
Chapter One
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. These dreams are now recurring with a puzzling frequency, and I've come to dread them. All of the Manderley dreams are bloodcurdling and this one was the "worst--no question at all.
The door opened, a thin beam of light fingered the walls, and a pale shape began to move quietly toward me. I made a cowardly moaning sound. Then I saw this phantom was wrapped up in a dressing gown and its hair was disheveled. I began to think it "might be my daughter--but was she really there, or was I dreaming her, too? Once I was sure it was Ellie, the palpitations diminished and the dream slackened its hold. Ellie hid her fears by being practical. She fetched warm milk and aspirin; she lit the gas fire, plumped up my pillows, and attacked my wayward eiderdown. Half an hour later, when we were both calmer, my nightmare was blamed on willfulness--and my weakness for late-night snacks of bread and cheese.
This fictitious indigestion was meant to reassure me--and it provided a good excuse for all Ellie's anxious questions concerning pain. Did I have an ache in the heart region? (Yes, I did.) Any breathing difficulties? "No, I damn well don't," I growled. "It was just a nightmare, that's all. Stop fussing, Ellie, for heaven's sake, and stopflapping around..."
""Mousetrap!" said my lovely, agitated, unmarried daughter. "Why don't you listen, Daddy? If I've warned you once, I've warned you a thousand times..."
Well, indeed. I've never been good at heeding anyone's warnings, including my own.
Because it's safer that way, I could have replied. It's twenty years since Rebecca died, so I've had two decades to learn the advantages of such pretences. That wasn't the answer I gave, however; in fact, I made no answer at all. Something perhaps the expression in Ellie's eyes, perhaps the absence of reproach or accusation in her tone, perhaps simply the fact that my thirty-one-year-old daughter still calls me "Daddy"--something at that point pierced my heart. I looked away, and the room blurred.
Ellie, who issubtle, did so without further comment or questions. She looked out across the moonlit bay toward the headland opposite, where Manderley lies. The great de Winter house, now in a state of ruination, is little more than a mile away as the crow flies. It seems remote when approached by land, for our country roads here are narrow and twisting, making many detours around the creeks and coves that cut into our coastline; but it is swiftly reached by boat. In my youth, I often sailed across there with Maxim de Winter in my dinghy. We used to moor in the bay below Manderley--the bay where, decades later, under mysterious circumstances, his young wife Rebecca would die.
A thin bright band of moonlight bent into the room; on the air came a breath of salt and sea freshness: Rebecca rose up in my mind. I saw her again as I first saw her, when I was ignorant of the power she would come to exert on my life and my imagination (that I possess any imagination at all is something most people would deny). I watched her enter, then re-enter, then re-enter again that great mausoleum of a drawing room at Manderley--a room, indeed an entire house, that she would shortly transform.She entered at a run, bursting out of the bright sunlight, unaware anyone was waiting for her: a bride of three months; a young woman--in a white dress, with a tiny blue enamelled butterfly brooch pinned just above her heart.
Review
“If youve never read Rebecca, Beaumans book is still a cracking good read.” Detroit Free Press
Synopsis
April 1951. It is twenty years since the death of Rebecca, the hauntingly beautiful first wife of Maxim de Winter. Twenty years since Manderley, the de Winter family's estate, was destroyed by fire. But Rebecca's tale is just beginning.
Colonel Julyan, an old family friend, receives an anonymous package concerning Rebecca. An inquisitive young scholar named Terence Gray appears and stirs up the quiet seaside hamlet with disturbing questions about the past -- and with the close ties he soon forges with the Colonel and his eligible daughter, Ellie. Amid bitter gossip and murky intrigue, the trio begins a search for the real Rebecca, and the truth behind her mysterious death.
About the Author
Sally Beauman's novels have been translated into more than twenty languages and have been best-sellers worldwide. She has written for numerous magazines in both the United States and England, including The New Yorker and The Daily Telegraph. She lives with her family in London and on an island in the Hebrides.