AUTHOR’S NOTE

Marie Tussaud, Paul Philidor, Pinetti, Mrs Druce and His Grace William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Portland were real people connected by their love of magic, the supernatural, automatons and the intriguing setting of Baker Street (made famous by a certain nineteenth-century fictional detective). In the spirit of creativity, I tweaked some of their ages and life events in order to have them crossing paths at the right time.

Tussaud and Philidor did work together to produce the Phantasmagoria. And Marie opened an early exhibition in London at the Baker Street Bazaar, which was the centre of a scandal involving His Grace William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Portland, his purported alter ego Thomas Charles and the landlady Druce, who did claim that her son was his illegitimate child. She insisted that Thomas Charles’s body be exhumed, claiming the coffin would be empty; it eventually was exhumed and found to contain the right body, and as a consequence she was deemed mad and placed in a lunatic asylum.

Philidor was a German stage magician, as was Pinetti. The former was inspired by the latter’s show of ‘mechanical wonders’, but Pinetti had most likely died by the time Philidor was of an age to be a rival. I thought it would be interesting to make them brothers and add another dimension to the story.

Welbeck Abbey is still standing, complete with its underground ballroom, library, tunnels, pink walls, gardens, grounds and forest. His Grace William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Portland, with all of his eccentricities and afflictions, epitomised a quote attributed to the American novelist Tom Clancy: ‘The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.’

The mantelpiece was never at Welbeck but it exists, made from a bedhead with supposed mystical powers; I learnt about it from an episode of Great British Ghosts. I believe it still stands at Ye Olde King’s Head, a pub in Chester.