Author Note

This story is set in one of my favorite places, the heritage coastline and moorland around the ancient port of Whitby in North Yorkshire. Since Dracula got there first, I deliberately avoided anything gothic-related in the first book of this series, The Convenient Felstone Marriage, but this time I wanted to evoke the wilder atmosphere of the surrounding landscape, the rugged heathland and windswept moors that remind me of why I fell in love with Victorian literature in the first place. This was also largely thanks to the copy of Jane Eyre my mother gave me, which I read on a visit to my grandparents, twenty-five years ago. It was the first “grown-up” book I ever read and is still my favorite. In my mind, Yorkshire, romance and a gothic landscape will be forever entwined.