The Letters Sewn in Black by Celia Vellgrave

A mourning gown arrives at Number Seventeen without a sender.

Someone has sewn letters into its black lining.

For Marian Quenell and Elspeth Cattermole, the discovery should be another piece of the strange history concealed within the London house they inherited together. Instead, the letters lead them to the story of two women whose relationship was deliberately erased—and to a country estate whose respectable past depends upon keeping that erasure intact.

Decades earlier, Honoria Peverell was described by her family as unstable, difficult, and eventually incapable of managing her own affairs. Yet the letters hidden in her mourning clothes tell another story: of a woman separated from the person she loved, confined behind altered walls, and gradually stripped of the freedom to decide the course of her own life.

Worse still, Peregrine Dallow—the dead man who left Number Seventeen to Marian and Elspeth—was involved.

The deeper they investigate, the harder it becomes to believe Dallow was merely the benevolent guardian of forgotten women they once imagined him to be.

But the past is not the only thing threatening the life Marian and Elspeth have built.

Elspeth has received the most important professional offer of her career: a commission abroad that could establish her reputation beyond anything she has previously achieved. Marian insists she must accept it.

Elspeth wishes, desperately and furiously, that Marian would ask her to stay.

Marian refuses to turn love into possession.

Elspeth begins to wonder whether refusing to ask is simply another way of refusing to admit how much someone matters.

As the story of Honoria and the woman she loved begins to mirror questions neither Marian nor Elspeth is prepared to answer, an investigation into stolen letters becomes something far more dangerous: a confrontation with the difference between loving someone and choosing a life with her.

Because sometimes freedom is taken by force.

Sometimes it is surrendered out of fear.

And sometimes the most devastating words are the ones two people love each other too much to say.

The Letters Sewn in Black is the third novel in The Women of Number Seventeen, a Victorian Gothic sapphic romance series about hidden histories, complicated women, forbidden intimacy, domestic mysteries, and two women attempting to build a permanent life in a world that refuses to give their relationship a name.