Golden thread. Tea Cooper. 2024.

Maitland, 1889. When nineteen-year-old Constance Montague wakes one Wednesday she expects the day to unfold like any other. Breakfast with her grandmother Nell and her mother Faith, a meeting in Maitland with the ladies of the Benevolent Society, perhaps a gentle scroll along the banks of the Hunter River. But this Wednesday is different. Nell has vanished.

Concerned, Connie is determined to track Nell down and follows a lead to Old Government House in Parramatta, now a guest house. There, to her astonishment, she finds her grandmother holding court.

When Nell introduces her as her companion to a varied cast of colourful guests and the enigmatic housekeeper who is connected with Nell’s past, Connie begins to realize  that her grandmother is not who she seems. Nell is looking for something and following a thread stitched long ago, a thread that leads from some missing gold to a damask dress and the attic of Government House. As the story unravels so do the secrets of the past, secrets that surface into the present to threaten not just Nell, but Connie too.