In March 1941, Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in England’s River Ouse. Her body was found three weeks later. What seemed like a tragic ending at the time was, in fact, just the beginning of a mystery. . . . Six decades after Virginia Woolf’s death, landscape designer Jo Bellamy has come to Sissinghurst Castle for two reasons: to study the celebrated White Garden created by Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West and to recover from the terrible wound of her grandfather’s unexplained suicide. In the shadow of one of England’s most famous castles, Jo makes a shocking find: Woolf’s last diary, its first entry dated the day after she allegedly killed herself. If authenticated, Jo’s discovery could shatter everything historians believe about Woolf’s final hours. But when the Woolf diary is suddenly stolen, Jo’s quest to uncover the truth will lead her on a perilous journey into the tumultuous inner life of a literary icon whose connection to the White Garden ultimately proved devastating. Rich with historical detail, The White Garden is an enthralling novel of literary suspense that explores the many ways the past haunts the present–and the dark secrets that lurk beneath the surface of the most carefully tended garden. “Barron is a master at crafting English period pieces.”— Denver Post “ The White Garden grows an intriguing tale, weaving together the tendrils of past and present, growth and corruption, love and despair, into a landscape of hope. This is a mystery in a garden: a garden in war; a garden beset by modernity; a ghostly white garden haunted by the dead.”  —Laurie R. King, author of The Language of Bees “Stephanie Barron has concocted a delicious exploration of what could have happened to Virginia Woolf in the weeks between her disappearance and the day her body floated to the surface of the river Ouse. Part mystery, part a search for redemption, The White Garden will entrance readers from the moment they open it.”  —Tasha Alexander, author of And Only to Deceive Stephanie Barron is the author of nine bestselling Jane Austen mysteries. She lives near Denver, Colorado. Chapter One October 2008 Kent, England Jo Bellamy eased her rental car cautiously into the Slip Road roundabout, every fiber of her body braced for the shuddering crash that must surely come, and when it didn’t—when the circular bit of carriageway remained miraculously free of maddened English drivers on this late October morning—she darted a glance in the wrong direction, cursed softly, then searched over her left shoulder for the first available exit from this particular rung of hell. She was looking for something called the A262, which ought to lead straight to the castle, but after an hour and a half of descending from London’s Victoria Embankment through the Blackwall Tunnel, not to mention Margate and Maidstone, her patience was frayed and her calf muscles cramped. She was a brown-haired, crinkle-eyed American woman, thirty-four years of age, and this was her first visit to England—which sufficed to say that she had never driven on the left side of the road before. She had particularly never driven a stick-shift transmission on the left, and both her feet and her hands were disobeying her rational mind’s orders. She had stalled twice, clipped the left side of the car with an errant curb (or kerb, as they insisted on spelling it here), and was desperate for a stiff drink, although it was only eleven o’clock in the morning. If she did not find the castle soon, she intended to drive the darling little Mini straight into one of the massive oaks that lined the carriageway, and walk to Sissinghurst. And then, quite suddenly, the tower rose up from the sheep pastures and tilled fields and she felt her pent-up breath exhale slowly from her lungs. For years she had read about Sissinghurst, in textbooks, magazines, and glossy coffee-table volumes her grandmother kept in her small house back in the Delaware Valley. She’d known what to expect: Elizabethan tower of rosy brick, rising some five stories with a weather vane on top, lapped by the burnished farmland and woods named the Weald of Kent, or what remained of it. The tower was almost derelict when the Nicolson family bought it in 1930, and they had set about clearing the weeds and neglected cottages at the tower’s foot until a courtyard and a clutch of buildings remained. These they knit into a minor paradise with a series of gardens, as though tower, cottages, sweep of lawn, and surviving moat were a single house, half of it exposed to sunlight and rain. The Nicolsons took their meals in one room (outdoors) and made their beds in others; but the tower had been the sole province of Mrs. Nicolson: Vita Sackville-West, the writer. Jo frowned at her choice of words as she steered the Mini recklessly into the National Trust car park. The writer was one way to describe Vita Sackville-West, but the gardener was another. The woman had written abou