The House Divided at Dusk. The Women of Number Seventeen, #1

Two women inherit one London house. Neither knows the dead man who left it to them. And neither is prepared for what he concealed inside its walls. London, 1887. Widowed Marian Quenell has spent years learning how to survive respectable society by understanding its rules better than the people who made them. Controlled, elegant, and painfully aware of what scandal can cost a woman, she has no intention of allowing an eccentric stranger's will to disrupt the careful life she has rebuilt.
Decorative artist Elspeth Cattermole has spent just as long avoiding anything that might resemble permanence. Sharp-eyed, irreverent, and far more comfortable climbing a ladder than obeying social expectations, she knows how to uncover what beautiful rooms are designed to hide. Then Peregrine Dallow leaves them both Number Seventeen, Celandine Square. Marian owns the lower rooms and permanent fixtures.
Elspeth owns the upper floors and almost everything that can be moved. Neither owns the entrance hall outright. Neither may sell without the other's consent. And if either abandons the house for too long, her share passes to a mysterious third beneficiary. Their uneasy arrangement quickly becomes a battle over furniture, servants, money, privacy-and the infuriating attraction neither woman wishes to acknowledge.
But Elspeth soon discovers that one of the parlours is smaller on the inside than it should be. Behind its wall lies a forgotten passage containing the remains of women's letters, evidence of secret meetings, and a candle burned far more recently than anything else in the sealed space. Someone has been inside Number Seventeen. Someone is still searching it. As Marian and Elspeth follow the traces left behind by women whose lives were deliberately erased from respectable history, they discover that Peregrine Dallow's peculiar inheritance was never merely an eccentric game.
Number Seventeen protected secrets powerful families were willing to bury-and at least one person is prepared to destroy what remains. Forced into an alliance neither of them entirely trusts, Marian and Elspeth find their arguments becoming dangerously intimate. Desire is easier to admit than dependence. A kiss is easier than a promise. And when the secrets in the walls place both the house and its hidden history in danger, the two women must decide whether what has begun between them is another temporary refuge-or something neither of them knows how to name.
The House Divided at Dusk is the first novel in The Women of Number Seventeen, a Victorian gothic sapphic romance series about hidden histories, dangerous inheritances, complicated love, and two women slowly building a life in a world determined not to recognize what they are to each other.