Excerpt: The Estate by Sarah Jost

Blurb

A Town & Country Best Book of November!

Named a Most-Anticipated book by Crime Reads, Criminal Element, The Nerd Daily, and more!

“The world of art is blown wide open” (Jonathan Santlofer, national bestselling author of The Lost Van Gogh) in this simmering speculative suspense for fans of The Cartographers that follows art historian Camille Leray, whose secret ability lands her in the middle of the dangerous schemes of the most powerful players in the industry…

Art historian Camille Leray has spent her career surrounding herself with fineries and selling pieces worth millions. But she harbors a secret: she has the ability to enter the world of any piece of artwork, and she can take others with her. But tapping into history comes with great risks. And someone has been watching, someone who knows about her magic, and her mistakes…

After Camille ruins her career and reputation by misusing her powers, she vows to get her old life back. So when Maxime Foucault, an enigmatic aristocrat who owns a sprawling French estate, enlists her help in authenticating the statues of a mysterious artist, whose disappearance she has been trying to solve for years, she knows this could be her chance to turn her career around and get the man she’s always wanted.

But something isn’t right about the Foucault family and the grand chateau they inhabit, and as Camille gets sucked into its walls, she finds a world of luxury and greed that causes her to risk losing herself, and everything she has ever known, forever.

Filled with magic, suspense, the allure of Arthurian legend, and dark academia, The Estate unravels a mystery that spans generations—while blurring the fine lines between reality and imagination, creation and destruction, and being haunted or free.

Excerpt

If anybody in the art world found out about my gift, they would think I’m mad, some kind of hippiesque charlatan, and I would lose all credibility as an expert, no matter how good my knowledge actually is and how many hours of actual research and labor I’ve put into building my career. Over the years, to compensate and hide my insider knowledge, I’ve made sure to work twice as hard as anybody else to earn my reputation and their respect. At Courtenay, I’m the one everyone jokes about keeping a sleeping bag and hair straighteners in the office. My life is art, appraising and selling. My whole life.

I never thought it would be taken away from me, until this wrong Night Swimming landed on my desk. Now I can’t look at it without fear, but I can’t let it be sold as Constance Sorel’s; that sculpture feels like nothing she’s ever made, and the night I tried to tap into it left me scarred and terrified. I know I need to try once more to tell them the truth. Even if it has to be desperate and public.

So here I am today, forcing my way to the pre­sale showcase, looking professional on the outside and, on the inside, in a state of disarray. I care about her so much, and what will be labeled as hers. And also…I need them to believe me—­the buyers, the experts, the journalists, Rob. I need to know they respect my judgment enough to listen. I clutch my hands into fists to stifle their shaking. I know I must resist the pull of the sculpture, keep my head on straight and speak clearly, but I can’t stop looking at it.

“Leray. Go home. Remember what we talked about yesterday.”

I don’t turn to Rob, who is still at my elbow like a bouncer ready to whisk me out of the room any minute.

“This is wrong.” I only intended to speak to him, but the words come out of my mouth loud enough that conversations around us quieten.

“Camille.” The warning hisses through his tense jaw.

“What is going on?” Biscuit Man asks behind me, addressing Rob. The man in charge. Rob’s hand grips my upper arm.

Murmurs rise behind me, but much harder to ignore, the sculpture is trying to pull me in and I’m fighting to resist it. Sorel’s works have always been my comfort zone. Since I found her, I’ve always felt I understood her. That our lives were connected across time and space. But this—­this is something else, so deep and full of destruction, like a black hole trying to suck me in. Normally I can choose when to go, I can control it, but the water is here, risen to my ankles, heavy and wet and empty all at once. I don’t want to go in again. I can’t—­

“That’s not right. There’s something wrong with it.” I aim for a strong, calm professional statement but it comes out as a desperate plea. Rob is escorting me out now and I can only use all the fight in me to stay in this reality, to shut out the dark pond taking shape around me, crawling all over the parquet—­rising, rising…

“Wait. Leray, are you OK?” Rob stops. Among the spreading night, a glimpse of his furious yet concerned eyes reach me.

“Please help, I don’t want to go in,” I whisper to him, trying to cling on to him, but, as if someone has pulled a giant plug or exploded a dam, the water engulfs me.

Oh, God. I’m back in.

It is dark, like it always is, but somehow burning. I have to swim, I know I need to find the bottom, but there is no light—­this water is thick like tar, filling my eyes, my lungs. Screams ambush me, distorted sonars through the substance. Useless. Never good enough. Better off if you died; hands wrestling me in place while others slap me, hard. It’s like sleep apnea, like drowning. It is relentless: the anguish, the violence, the terror, the deepest, darkest kind of primal fear. I am small, and terrified, and vulnerable; I am ten years old, cowering, too scared even to sob. I resist swimming deeper with all my might. She stole you. She took you away. I miss you. You drowned him. Stay here with me, at the bottom. Let us die together. Keys locking me in, irons on my ankles, my wrists. My reality smashed into smithereens, the hammer cracking my skull. They’re holding me down. I’m going to die, to suffocate, and people want me to—­

And suddenly I see her, floating across from me, and her face is terrified, screaming for help. The woman in the Hepburn dress.

Jesus. How is she here? How—­her eyes are bulging, she is gasping for air, her hand trying to clutch mine, but she is too far—­No, oh my God, no… This kicks some life into me, and I fight with everything I have to get close enough to grab her, and my mind wins, in the nick of time; the water recedes, the parquet rises hard to meet my body. I’m prone, feeling like I’ve landed from a great height, my body burning with the absence of oxygen. Rob is splashing cold water in my face. It gets into my nose—­the idiot used sparkling water—­I gasp, pushing him away, scrambling on my hands and knees to find enough air.

What happened? It was like the first time I went in, except—­except I tried to resist it and couldn’t. Did I really pull that woman in with me? That’s impossible. I’ve tried before to show Lowen but it never worked. My ears are buzzing, blood leaving my brain and extremities. Am I going to faint again? Or throw up? I still feel the sludge of darkness on my skin, inside my ears and nose. I feel sticky, heavy, like a bird caught in an oil slick. I look for the woman. I need to ask her…

“Someone fainted!” The shrill call of an emergency helps to bring me back. Rob and I turn at once. The first thing I see are her silver stilettos. She is lying on the floor, motionless, while her useless companion attempts to revive her.

“Camille, what the fuck?” Rob hisses, letting me go as we both rush to her.

“Could this be Stendhal syndrome?” Biscuit Man asks the onlookers, while the security guard props her legs up on someone’s bag. I crouch on the floor next to her. Is he right, or have I…done this to her? How did she follow me? I take her hand, patting it gently, praying she just had a funny turn.

“That’s fucking made up, mate.” I know Rob is beyond crisis mode because he’s never sworn in front of a client before.

Finally, she resurfaces. Everybody breathes a sigh of relief, but her first words are not words. She screams. It ripples across the small crowd, scrambling like an army of spiders under our skins. Then she looks straight at me, snatches her hand out of mine. “Get away from me!” I’m sure her eyes aren’t the same as they were before. They’re bigger, swallowed somehow. She points to the sculpture. The room is silent, the worst kind of silence, as she starts sobbing.

“Get me out of here,” she tells her companion, who helps her up. Her legs are jelly and he has to prop her up. “Away from that thing. And away from her!”

Nobody else moves as he walks her out. I turn to Rob, then to the potential buyers. They’re all looking at the sculpture, and I swear I see in them a glimpse of that terror, making them back away, slowly, toward the exit. Then Rob shakes his head and springs back to life. “I need to deal with this. Leray, get out. Now.”

This time, I do. My head is buzzing, nausea rolling through me. I need air. I need—­as I exit the room, I turn around, trying one last time to make sense of what happened. It’s like the aftermath of a disaster; people seeking each other’s support, tending to their unease. Did I do this? Did I bring it all out somehow, whatever wrongness is inside that sculpture?

And that’s when I notice him. He’s standing at the back but, unlike everyone else, isn’t cowering away, or gulping champagne as if to build up courage. He is looking straight at me, and I can’t believe I didn’t notice him before. When did he arrive? How could I have missed him?

Maxime Foucault.

I can’t help it; for a second, despite the urgency of getting out of that room, I turn to him like a sunflower drawn to his features, to the warmth of his utter charisma and the desperate way I have missed him. He’s not smiling at me. His eyes are probing, clever, calm.

I don’t see him in fifteen years, and he finally turns up to see me crash our biggest sale?

Shame breaks the spell and I stumble down the stairs. I hurry away as if I am leaving a burning building, the walls melting around me, threatening to close me in. I run to try and escape the mental image of the woman floating in the dark pond, her mouth opened in a silent scream.

My power has never been dangerous before. To me, or to others.

But now, it might be.

About the Author

Sarah Jost was born and grew up in Switzerland, against the backdrop of Lake Geneva and the Alps. She moved to the UK in 2008 to learn English for a year and somehow didn’t manage to leave. She now works as a French teacher and pastoral manager in a girls’ school, which she considers an immersive course in character study. Her debut novel One Last Chance (UK) / Five First Chances (US) is out in April 2023. Some of her favourite themes are art, empathy, female protagonists with space to grow, love stories in all shapes and quirky animals. Sarah lives in Buckinghamshire with her husband Luke and their adorable (and hard to keep up with!) golden shepherd Winnie.