‘She combines imagination with delicate feeling, capturing the right atmosphere with a simple style that makes her story timeless’ Times Literary Supplement
A Victorian gentleman is forced by illness to entertain himself with the family archive, and he uncovers the Regency-era correspondence and diaries of one Miles Lufton, MP - apparently a black sheep of the family, connected with a scandal long buried. But through the pieced-together artefacts from the past, a fuller picture emerges of a man torn between two personalities – Miles, serious, studious and penniless, and ‘Pronto’, flirt, political mover and eternal ‘extra man’. Miles longs to dispose of his disreputable alter ego, but that way lies calamity . . .
See also: The Forgotten Smile