Acknowledgments  

I should like to thank some people for their help and wise comments. Mrs. Wendy Hill followed the London end of the story with a sharp eye for topographical detail. In Paris, Kay Dumas plunged into the Bibliothèque Nationale shortly after its removal to new premises and survived to tell the tale. I am grateful to the staff of the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Trinity College Cambridge Library; East Sussex County Records Office; and the staff of the Brighton Central Library. Elizabeth North gave me support and a novelist’s insights into the central character and suffered her presence in the life we share with unfailing good humor. Finally, as every author knows, some works are happier to see through to a conclusion than others. This has been a happy book, for which I am indebted to David Miller and Rebecca Wilson, more than I can say here. And at the very last, my special gratitude goes to Arabella Pike and Amy Scheibe, two incomparable editors separated only by the steep Atlantic stream.