For his botanical research, Professor Goodrich bought a remote old castle in Grantchester, a village outside Cambridge.
During the long summer, Clementine left Cambridge with her father and moved into the castle, where she waited for her acceptance letter from Trinity College, Cambridge.
-
Clementine's bedroom faced the vast garden behind the castle, where a quiet lake lay.
On her first night there, she drew back the curtains and glimpsed someone standing in the middle of the lake.
It looked like... a man, staring straight at her.
But when she closed the curtains and opened them again, the figure in the lake had vanished.
-
The next day, the castle servants found Clementine beside the lake in the vast garden, sleepwalking and in disarray.
After examining her, the family doctor concluded that she had sleepwalked due to excessive mental strain.
-
From then on, Clementine tied herself up with a rope every night before going to sleep, making sleepwalking impossible.
But something even stranger happened: when she looked in the mirror each morning, she found fine red marks covering her chest and neck, while her arms and thighs were bruised with what looked like fingerprints.
They looked just like the marks left by lovers lost in passion.
-
In autumn, when her acceptance letter from Trinity arrived, postmarked and delivered, Clementine could hardly wait to say goodbye to Professor Goodrich.
She hurried back to Cambridge by carriage, delighted to leave the eerie castle behind.
-
But the unexpected happened. Clementine should have been sleeping in the soft bed at her old home in Cambridge, yet when she woke, she was lying beside the blue lake once more.
Her head rested on a pair of cold, wet, yet remarkably sturdy knees. A strange sensation brushed back and forth across her face, and then she heard a soft sigh.
[Reading Guide]
1. Supernatural, mildly scary, with cosmic horror elements. The "water nymph" is madly, madly, madly obsessed with the heroine's skin and natural scent.
2. The male lead is not human. When the heroine was young, he was a "motherly man" who breastfed her.
3. A sweet story, no angst, with an unconventional, darkly devoted romance.
4. Set at the transition between the Tudor and Stuart dynasties in England. The heroine is self-reliant and defies the oppression women faced under the social hierarchy of the time.
5. Readers who care about historical accuracy should proceed with caution. This is an alternate history set in the same period, but the characters, events, and background are unrelated to reality.
(Note: This blurb was recorded on April 5, with screenshots for proof. Any plagiarism will be pursued.)
Theme: Protect wetlands and care for one another
