My fascination with the Middle Ages took hold when I was quite young, probably seven years old, after seeing a reproduction of an illuminated image showing Christine de Pizan writing in her study, a small dog at her feet. Later, while at the University of Notre Dame, I was fortunate enough to study in the Medieval Institute under D’Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton and Dolores Warwick Frese. One of my fondest college memories was writing a paper for Dr. Boulton about the Carolingian queens, and it was a delight to get back to medieval sources for this novel. Beyond the writings of Christine de Pizan and Andreas Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love, I relied on The Paston Letters (a fantastic collection of correspondence written by three generations of an English family in the fifteenth century), Frances and Joseph Gies’s Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages, Jennifer Ward’s Women in Medieval Europe 1200–1500, and the extensive body of work done by Juliet Barker and Anne Curry about Henry V. In particular, I used Barker’s phenomenal books Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle that Made England and Conquest: The English Kingdom of France to guide my descriptions of Henry’s campaigns in France. The lectures I attended at the 2013 conference at Canterbury Cathedral commemorating the 600th anniversary of the death of Henry IV proved insightful and enlightening, especially Dr. Curry’s “Father and Son Revisited: Henry IV and Henry Prince of Wales,” and Dr. Ian Mortimer’s “Henry IV, his Reputation and Legacy.” Kevin Goodman’s article “The Strange Case of Henry V’s Wandering Wound” provided information about the wound and subsequent treatment Henry received at Shrewsbury. My son, Alexander Tyska, has proved himself again and again a historian of impeccable knowledge and was invaluable to me when I was researching this book. As always, with so many wonderful sources, any mistakes are my own.
I have long wanted to give readers a glimpse into the Hargreaves family history. Up to this volume of the series, all we knew was they had an ancestor who distinguished himself at Agincourt, earning the land that became Anglemore Park. I hope readers recognize some of Colin’s traits in both William and Cecily.
The appeal of English history and the Tower of London is undeniable. I could only resist it for so long before incorporating it into a novel, and am delighted to be able to have Emily read Mrs. Braddon’s The Infidel. Moogy, the boy Jeremy befriends in the East End, is inspired by a photograph in Horace Warner’s Spitalfields Nippers. A collection of photographs he took of London’s poorest residents around the turn of the twentieth century, these pictures offer a profoundly moving look at children living in poverty. One of them, of a boy named Moogy Kelvin, haunted me from the moment I saw it, so I decided to put him in the book.
Finally, I can’t believe we’ve reached the end of the Victorian era. In 2003, when I wrote the first Emily book, And Only to Deceive, I harbored a hope that it might be the start of a long-running series, but it seemed like hubris to breathe that out loud. Now, all these years later, I owe my success to the marvelous readers who have supported me for a decade and beyond. I am more grateful than you can ever know and hope you’ll stick with me now that Emily and Colin are Edwardians.…