The Ghost - Danielle Steel

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.