To bring a crumbling manor back to life, she had to wake a spectre... but the cost of his resurrection is a debt written in frost.

Two centuries of silence. One final performance. A love that demands the ultimate price.

When twenty-eight-year-old Sarah d’Entrecasteux arrives at the long-abandoned D’Seye Manor, she brings nothing but a suitcase, a fierce streak of Antipodean optimism, and a profound grief she cannot shake. Her plan to reclaim the dilapidated 18th-century estate and transform its grand hall into a vibrant community theatre is a beautiful distraction—but the manor is not empty...

Gerard d’Seye is a cold, arrogant gentleman, a spectre bound to the house by the curse of a young housemaid dying in labour with his child. To him, vibrant, paint-stained Sarah is an unwelcome, disruptive intruder. Yet, as Sarah’s rehearsals echo through the halls, fragments of witty Restoration comedies and rebuilding and refurbishing running apace, her unwavering enthusiasm cracks his centuries-old aristocratic armour of disdain.

What begins as a localized chill deepens into an intimate, breathless partnership. With a mismatched theatrical ensemble of local builders and eccentric performers gathered around them, Sarah’s drive achieves the impossible: drawing Gerard out of the shadows, making his physical form warm, solid, and pulsing with real human life.

But every fairy tale has a hidden cost, and the housemaid's 200-year-old curse operates with a lethal mechanism. As opening night approaches and Sarah's and Gerard's heartbeats align under the glare of the stage lights, a strange, unnatural winter frost begins to take root inside the manor's walls.

To protect Sarah and the fragile household she has built, Gerard must choose between the safe, frozen distance of his past isolation or stepping onto the stage to face a final, irreversible and tragic reckoning. Yet love's legacies remain, and love's work continues.

[AI assisted, not AI generated]