Juanita Dalbrook, only child of a Dorchester shopkeeper's son who rose to be a judge and Baron Cheriton, marries Sir Godfrey Carmichael, her sweetheart since childhood, in Westminster Abbey and brings him home to Cheriton Chase for the honeymoon. Within days he is found shot dead in the drawing-room, with no enemy anyone can name, and the nineteen-year-old widow swears to see his murderer hanged. Convinced that the blow came from some survivor of the Strangways, the reckless old family whose house her father bought and whose portraits still hang on its walls, she sets her distant cousin Theodore Dalbrook, a Dorchester solicitor who has quietly loved her for years, to find out whether any of them are still alive. Braddon wrote the sensation novel better than anyone and worked at it for fifty years. Fifty-six plates, among them portraits by William Powell Frith and John Pettie, trace the faces of a Victorian world where a bride's brief happiness turns to widowhood.
