The Story of Ivy

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. At a glittering country-house weekend, Ivy Lexton is impossible to overlook: beautiful, magnetic, and instantly fascinating to wealthy Miles Rushworth, yet also unsettlingly self-interested. Beneath the polished conversation, the women around her debate whether she is a charming victim of circumstance or a calculating social climber who measures people by what they can give her. Mary Hampton's sharp observations of Ivy's rudeness, her hunger for money, and her sudden warmth toward an heiress confirm the suspicion that glamour is only one part of her story. That tension deepens when the novel reveals Ivy's shabby poverty with Jervis, and her determination to survive by using old attachments, including a former lover. A letter from her friend Rose Arundell introduces Mrs. Thrawn, a fortune-teller whose uncanny powers seem to promise Ivy a way forward. Drawn by desperation and curiosity, Ivy visits the strange woman on the Embankment, where a palm reading foretells sudden money, danger, and a love affair that may end in shame. As scandal gathers around a suspected arsenic poisoning, Dr. Roger Gretorex is questioned by Inspector Orpington, and the case begins to close in on Ivy, her dead husband, and the man who loves her.