Doppelgänger

An impoverished young teacher loses his job when the informal ragged school where he works shuts down. A much-needed stroke of luck, however, brightens Alec Herridge's prospects when he stumbles across a frame-maker's shop and is offered a job. This puts him squarely in the path of an enigmatic and wealthy family from France-expatriates whom gossips whisper about. Something, they say, has followed mother and son to England, and day servants complain about a heaviness in the air whenever the family is at home.

It's a dark energy that turns its attention to Alec now that his new job requires him to work closely with Marguerite and Théo LaSalle. It also appears to him as a silent lookalike of Théo, its presence marked by whispers in a child's voice. Urging, pleading, desperately reaching out to Alec for help.

Folklore defines doppelgängers as heralds of ill fortune, but Alec soon discovers there's much more to Théo's double than a warning. That whatever horrible secrets the LaSalle family believes were left behind in France aren't the kind so easily explained away. That something has, indeed, followed them in exile and now refuses to be ignored or forgotten.