A new longer length story from Clarice Black

How do the worlds of a greedy London doctor, who had refused to treat the poor and destitute plague sufferers, and the millennial journalism student from Leeds intercept?

Jennie, the millennial college student, with a disregarding mother and an over-compensating father, chooses to pause her studies to experience the realities of life. She accepts a position as au-pair to Mr. and Mrs. Walker and their seven-year old daughter at their newly acquired Bleak House on the outskirts of London.

Martin is the perfect employer with many problems on his personal and professional fronts. His wife becomes inexplicably disabled, having reached a pinnacle in the journalistic world and attaining unimagined wealth. He loses his lucrative and satisfying job and takes up a demanding position in its stead which keeps him from home for long hours. Their daughter, Abigail, is uncharacteristically obedient and compliant and spends most of her school holidays in the company of her plush toys and dolls in her new bedroom.

New in the house, and rebutted by Mary Walker at every opportunity, Jennie experiences odd sounds and sightings in Abigail's room, and Abigail's constant preoccupation with the 'imaginary' birdman. Then there's the omnipresent stench of death seemingly emanating from the very ground beneath the house. The Walkers fob off her concerns and Jennie is left to solve the mysteries of the Bleak House alone and in a strange place.

Will she dig up the long forgotten from a long time past, or will the truth be closer to home?

"She can see in the dark corner of her bedroom, a blood-red figure draped in shrouds, his face masked with a beak and goggled, tinted eyes. She calls him the birdman. Jennie can see it too. In the days that follow, Jennie begins to uncover- not by her choice- the dreary dark past that's clung to the Bleak House."