The Shadow Sister

The third installment of Lucinda Riley's Seven Sisters series follows Star D'Aplièse, a quiet twenty-seven-year-old grieving the death of her adoptive father, Pa Salt, who raised six adopted daughters at Atlantis, the family estate on Lake Geneva. Before his death, Pa Salt left each sister clues to her origins and coordinates engraved on an armillary sphere, a model of the celestial globe. Star has not yet opened hers. She shares a cramped London apartment with CeCe, the sister closest to her in age, whose loud, dominating presence has always filled the silence Star cannot. CeCe has just purchased a riverside apartment in Battersea with money she received after a private meeting with Pa Salt's lawyer, and her overbearing nature increasingly suffocates Star.

Star travels alone to Atlantis, where she confides in Marina, the sisters' guardian, about feeling trapped. She recalls turning down Cambridge to attend the University of Sussex with CeCe, who needed her support; CeCe later dropped out, deepening Star's regret. In Pa Salt's garden, Star opens his letter, which directs her to a London bookshop called Arthur Morston Books and tells her to ask about a woman named Flora MacNichol. The envelope also contains a black onyx cat figurine on a silver base engraved "Panther," with tiny amber jewel eyes, and a quotation from Khalil Gibran's The Prophet: "The oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow" (25). Star recognizes the line as describing her codependent relationship with CeCe.

Back in London, Star learns that her sister Ally's fiancé, Theo, has drowned. She attends his funeral, deeply moved, and promises herself she will one day experience love's intensity. Inspired by Ally's plan to investigate her own origins, Star enters Arthur Morston Books and meets Orlando Forbes, the eccentric, Edwardian-dressed proprietor. When Star mentions Flora MacNichol, Orlando grows contemplative but reveals little. He offers Star a job and promises to tell her more about Flora.

Orlando invites Star to High Weald, a graceful Tudor manor in Kent, for the seventh birthday of his nephew Rory, who is deaf from birth. Star connects with Rory through basic sign language. Marguerite Vaughan, Orlando's cousin and a painter, is Rory's warm but overwhelmed mother. Orlando's older brother, Mouse, arrives and proves cold and suspicious, questioning Star's motives. Orlando reveals that Flora MacNichol was the sister of their great-grandmother Aurelia. On a later visit, Star reads Mouse's transcription of Flora's journals, opening the historical storyline.

Flora MacNichol is a sharp-featured, dark-haired nineteen-year-old living at Esthwaite Hall in the Lake District in 1909, feeling like a misfit beside her golden younger sister Aurelia. She keeps rescued animals, including a black kitten she names Panther. When Archie Vaughan, the young Lord Vaughan from High Weald, visits, Flora resists him, but they discover a shared passion for botany and climb Scafell Pike together. Archie kisses her and confesses his love but says he must resolve a "complex situation." Flora soon learns from Aurelia's letters that her sister is falling in love with Archie. Out of duty and guilt, Flora confronts Archie and orders him to propose to Aurelia, sending the man she loves into her sister's arms.

When the family sells Esthwaite, Flora is sent to London to join the household of Mrs. Alice Keppel, the famous socialite and mistress of King Edward VII. Mrs. Keppel transforms Flora from a supposed tutor into a society figure, lavishing her with clothes and introductions. Flora meets the King, whom she knows only as "Bertie," and finds him warm and surprisingly fond of her. At Aurelia and Archie's wedding, Freddie Soames, a wealthy but vapid viscount, witnesses Archie kissing Flora beneath a yew tree. Flora accepts Freddie's proposal partly to secure his silence and partly as self-punishment. At Christmas, Mrs. Keppel presents Flora with a Fabergé figurine of a black cat, a gift the King commissioned for her. Later, when their old nursemaid innocently reveals that Archie once visited Flora at Esthwaite, Aurelia grows suspicious and discovers a warning letter Flora wrote to Archie. Aurelia confronts Flora, declares her no longer a sister, and banishes her.

The King dies on May 6, 1910. Freddie's family cancels the wedding. Sir Ernest Cassel, the King's financial adviser, reveals that King Edward VII was Flora's biological father; Flora's mother Rose had a brief affair with the then-Prince of Wales. The King has left Flora a letter, nearly ten thousand pounds, and his blessing to live freely. Flora flees to the Lake District.

Orlando reads the later journals to Star. Flora lives as a recluse for nine years near her friend Beatrix Potter, the beloved author and naturalist. After Panther the cat dies, Beatrix brings Flora a foundling boy, Teddy, whose shepherd father died in the Great War. Flora adopts him. In 1919, Archie arrives with news that Aurelia died after childbirth. In a deathbed letter, Aurelia forgives Flora, begs her to raise baby Louise at High Weald, and blesses a union with Archie. Archie secretly registers Teddy on the same date as Louise, listing himself as father, making the shepherd's son heir to the Vaughan peerage. They marry and live happily for decades. When the grown Teddy impregnates Tessie Smith, a Land Girl (a wartime female agricultural worker), Flora pays Tessie to leave quietly. Archie dies in a 1944 bombing, and Teddy inherits everything. Flora gives Arthur Morston Books to Louise and her husband Rupert Forbes as a wedding gift.

Orlando's research reveals the implications for Star's heritage. He traces Tessie's descendants to Lucy Charlotte Brown, born on Star's birthday in Hackney. Star is not descended from royalty but is almost certainly the great-granddaughter of Teddy, the adopted shepherd's son. Tessie's granddaughter changed her name to Sylvia Gray and is now a professor of Russian literature at Yale. Orlando's amusement at the irony wounds Star deeply.

Mouse independently attends one of Sylvia's lectures at Cambridge and brings her to High Weald. Star is initially furious at the ambush, but Sylvia explains she was only eighteen when Star was born; her controlling mother Patricia forged a death certificate and told Sylvia the baby had died. Sylvia learned the truth only weeks earlier when Patricia died and left a confessional letter. She presents Star with a charm bracelet engraved "Lucy Charlotte," and Star finally accepts the embrace she has been denied for twenty-seven years.

Mouse confesses that Rory is his biological son. His late wife Annie was deaf and chose to continue her pregnancy despite a cancer diagnosis, dying months after Rory's birth. Consumed by grief, Mouse could not look at the child and allowed Marguerite to raise him. Star urges Mouse to make amends for Rory's sake.

After attending Ally's concert in Bergen, Norway, Star agrees to join Mouse for a trip to the Lake District. They stay at Esthwaite Hall, now a hotel, retracing Flora and Archie's footsteps. Star confides her deepest fear, admitting she has never been in an intimate relationship, and Mouse responds with tenderness. He reveals his real name is Oenomaus, the mythological husband of Asterope, the star-maiden for whom Star is named. They return to High Weald together. Orlando opens a new bookshop in Tenterden, and Marguerite plans to move to France with her partner Hélène, swapping houses so Rory can remain in his childhood home. CeCe, who has left college and written Star a heartfelt letter confessing her loneliness, sits alone at Heathrow in a brief epilogue, resolving to let Star go because she loves her. As she walks through the terminal, she catches a flash of a familiar face, echoing Star's glimpse of what may have been Pa Salt at Ally's concert, but the figure vanishes.