For fans of Sarah Penner and The Foundling comes a slow-burn gothic mystery following Gillian, a young girl enthralled by the enigmatic Claybourne sisters, their house at Thornleigh Hall, and the tragedy that binds them together for good.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Emily Critchley’s The Undoing of Violet Claybourne, which is out March 4th 2025.
To become a Claybourne girl, she’ll have to betray one first.
1938. Gillian Larking, lonely and away at boarding school, is used to going unnoticed. But then she meets Violet Claybourne, her vibrant roommate who takes Gilly under her wing. Violet is unlike anyone Gilly has ever met, and she regales Gilly with tales of her grand family estate and her two elegant sisters. Gilly is soon entranced by stories of the Claybournes, so when Violet invites Gilly to meet her family at Thornleigh Hall, she can’t believe her luck.
But Gilly soon finds that behind the grand façade of Thornleigh Hall, darkness lurks.
Dazzled by the crumbling manor and Violet’s enigmatic sisters, Gilly settles into the estate. But when a horrible accident strikes on the grounds, she is ensnared in a web of the sisters’ making, forced to make a choice that will change the course of her life forever. Because the Claybournes girls know how to keep secrets, even at the cost of one of their own.
With ensnaring prose and layers of friendship, privilege, mental health, and more, The Undoing of Violet Claybourne is a poignant book club read with characters you won’t soon forget.
1991
Sixty years and I haven’t returned. Not once. Not until today.
The National Trust café is not particularly busy for a Saturday in March. I sip my tea and pick at a piece of lemon poppy seed cake. From here I can see the park. A few of the ornamental trees have gone, but the landscape is the same: the slope of the mount that leads down to the lake, the copse, and the beech woods beyond. I look away. Apparently they have Easter egg hunts in the woods now.
Last June my husband died, and I am now finally in the process of having a clear out. It’s a new phase, Mum, one of my daughters said helpfully.
There was a box up on top of the wardrobe in the spare bedroom. Nestled among a handful of loose photographs, postcards, and an old instruction manual for a Hoover I haven’t owned for over forty years, I came across a tiny, faded-green school diary with Heathcomb, Autumn term, 1938, printed on the front, along with the school crest.
How had it survived? I wondered.
I noticed my initials, in pencil, on the top corner of the front inside page: G. F. Larking. I hadn’t written much else in the diary. It was mostly full of the printed text that outlined the term’s activities: Tuesday 13th September, Pianoforte recital; Thursday 6th October, Upper School Debate; Monday 14th October, Prep B excused for Choral Society.
As I flicked through the diary, the only words of any interest were those I had written on Tuesday 20th December, the first day of the Christmas holidays. Thornleigh Hall.
I’d quickly closed the diary and returned it to the box.
But then, this morning, I found myself driving to North Oxfordshire. Parking in the car park (once a field belonging to the tenant farmer) and entering through the large oak, iron- studded doors. I paid an entrance fee and was given a guidebook. I wandered the rooms, avoiding the smiling, enthusiastic volunteers.
Looking around Thornleigh Hall, I felt suspended in time. Here I was, an old woman in sensible shoes clutching a guidebook, and yet there in the dining room was Emmeline drinking her morning coffee, Lord Claybourne reading his paper, Lady Claybourne complaining about her eggs, Violet tucking in to toast and black currant jam. And there was Laura in the library, her stockinged feet up on the sofa arm, leafing through a mag-azine. “Oh, hello, Gilly,” she said, seeing me standing there. “I wondered where you’d got to.”
I moved from room to room, pressing my nails into my guidebook. I watched the other visitors with their backpacks and cameras. Babies strapped to the chests of men. Mothers grip-ping the hands of small children. Look at that clock, darling, isn’t it beautiful?
As for me, I felt like a traveler returning to a faraway land, only to find it a pale shadow of what it once was. I was reminded of a time in my life that was both full of possibility and fraught with the anxieties of the very young. Thornleigh Hall— my visit in the winter of 1938 and the events that followed— had been the marker that forever divided my life. After Thornleigh, there was simply a before and an after.
In the café, I finish my cake, then set my fork down. On the table in front of me is a cut daffodil in a single stem vase, and I admire its bright resilience. I never got to see the park in spring. The daffodils. No doubt there will be bluebells in the woods soon too. Sitting alone at my table, I can hear gentle chatter, the clinking of teacups, the whir of a coffee machine. Feeling better, a little less discombobulated, I refill my teacup. Perhaps I was only in need of sustenance.
The waitress walks past me, carrying tea and cake to another table. With her rare combination of blond hair and brown eyes, she reminds me of Laura. She looks so young, but then I suppose we were all young then.
Laura.
I can still picture her, the last time I saw her in 1943, walking up the steps to the house in Richmond, fumbling for her key with a shaky hand. She’d turned and given me a small wave.
Three weeks later she was dead.
Laura’s death made all the papers. Countess’s sister involved in fatal accident. Society girl’s tragic death.
She had picked a spot along the coast from Brighton after driving all the way down from London. Petrol was still rationed then. She must have been saving it up. It was the end of the summer— the grassy cliff tops were sprinkled with white sea campion, pink thrift, wild garlic, and daisies. The blue water sparkled under the bright afternoon sun.
Lines like “grief-stricken” and “recently widowed” appeared in the papers, although no publication went as far as to say Laura had taken her own life. Laura’s brother- in- law, Viscount Cadwallander, was well- connected, and things may have been hushed up. I read the statement Emmeline had given to the Sunday papers: Laura must have lost control of the car; she was driving too fast. The road should be better signposted.
Despite the statement though, there was much speculation around Laura’s “accident,” especially after the testimony of the family who had been picnicking on the cliff top. I read their account of how Laura sped past them, her gloved hands gripping the wheel, her scarf flapping behind her in the breeze, her mouth set in a grim, determined line (or perhaps this is how I imagine it, anyway). She turned sharply off the road. The engine roared. The picnickers, their boiled eggs suspended halfway to their mouths, shielded their children’s eyes as the car sailed over the edge.
Poor Laura.
Like the picnickers, I was in no doubt that Laura’s death had been intentional. I knew something of her state of mind, especially after the day we’d left Wynscott. I should have kept a closer eye on her.
No invitation to the funeral arrived, and I have to say I was glad. I could just see Emmeline, her dark hair— so different from Laura’s blond— sculpted tastefully into a low chignon at the nape of her neck. She’d be wearing a black two- piece, gloves, and a tasteful pillbox, greeting the mourners with a steady hand as the first autumn leaves blew across the churchyard.
I wanted to remember Laura in my own way. Dancing to her jazz records in the tower bedroom, striding across the park in her Wellingtons, smoking a cigarette by the drawing- room window in the blue dusk of a winter afternoon.
How had it come to this? I’d wondered.
Now, in the café, I glance at my handbag and the pieces of paper folded inside.
Of course, it wasn’t only the discovery of my school diary that had brought me back to Thornleigh Hall today. It was the letter I’d received from Henry.
I had glanced, a few days ago, at those opening lines: Dear Mrs. McCune (my married name), I am writing to you at the request of my aunt, Violet Claybourne. This is a somewhat tricky letter to write—
I had dropped the letter, as if scalding hot, onto my kitchen table, then picked it up, stuffing it back in the envelope and hiding it behind the fruit bowl where I’d left it festering beside the browning bananas for several days. But then today, on my way out of the door, I’d put it in my handbag, slipped it among the throat sweets, pocket tissues, and my spare driving glasses. Perhaps, I thought, when I get to Thornleigh, I’ll know what to do with it.
I take the envelope out of my handbag and stare at it for a moment or two.
“Can I take that?”
I look up, startled, to find the young Laura- like waitress, gesturing to my empty plate.
“Oh, yes,” I say. “Thank you.”
The girl smiles, sweeps up my plate, and I reach for my tea, tepid now. I glance again out of the window, across the park, to the dark glitter of the lake and the woods beyond. I can see us there in our Christmas dresses, Laura clutching her flask, Violet in her woolen hat, Emmeline bending down to untie the boat from the landing stage.
The past, of course, is a different place, a place inhabited by people who would be completely at sea should they find them-selves here today. We were different people back then, products of our time— and of our circumstances.
But that is no excuse.
I realize my memories of that winter, through never being summoned to the forefront of my mind, are hazy and out of focus, mere impressions, as when my daughters were small and liked to rub their crayons over paper, revealing the ghost of the leaf below. When I think of the Christmas of 1938, what comes to mind is the sound of the dinner gong, the shine of the silverware, the rustle of Emmeline’s dress as she swept up the central staircase. Jazz music drifting through drafty, shut- up rooms, scarlet- clad figures galloping across snowy fields, and Violet sprawled star- shaped across her bed. “How good it is to be home, Gilly.”
But these are nothing more than scrambled snapshots, a slideshow of disordered images on a fuzzy projector screen. If I am to remember, to truly remember, I must go back to the very beginning. I must remember not only the glamour, the decadence, and the sense of wanting so desperately to belong that I felt in the company of the Claybourne sisters, but also the darker side of our story, what really happened during that winter break, and the events that led me to flee my life as I knew it. Only then will I know what to do with the letter.
