Author Note
An interest in a revived Gothic style, harking back to the pointed arches and rich ornamentation of the Middle Ages, developed in the later eighteenth century as an element of the Romantic movement and as a reaction to the cool perfection of the Classical style.
Horace Walpole’s Gothic revival Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham was begun in 1749. William Thomas Beckford, the wildly eccentric art collector and author of Gothic novels, built his Fonthill Abbey—an enormous mansion in the style of a medieval abbey—between 1796 and 1813, and landowners began to litter their grounds with follies resembling ruined castles or monasteries.
I have based Madelyn’s father, Peregrine Aylmer, on some of the more eccentric Gothic enthusiasts of the time, although he would probably have had most in common with the Thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, whose wildly ambitious Eglinton Tournament cost him between thirty and forty thousand pounds in 1839. Despite the contestants training with lances for up to a year beforehand, the tournament was widely mocked and suffered from dreadful weather.
More soberly, the Gothic style flourished in the Victorian age as the most ‘suitable’ style for churches, and was the chosen architecture for both the rebuilt Houses of Parliament—completed 1870—and Tower Bridge—1894.
Peregrine Aylmer would have approved of both, I am certain.
Castle Beaupierre, the Kent countryside—10th July, 1816
Jack Ransome reined in his horse on the crest of the rise and looked down at a vision of the fourteenth century transported to the age of the Hanoverians. England was still littered with castles, large and small. Some were ruins, some were converted long ago into more or less comfortable houses, but none still fulfilled the function for which they had been built. Except, apparently, this one.
It helped, of course, if you were wealthy and more than slightly eccentric as the late Peregrine Aylmer had been. Then you could pour thousands of pounds and a lifetime of scholarship into creating your fantasy world.
Castle Beaupierre seemed to bask as it lay in the sunshine that reflected off the polished slate of the roofs, the walls of creamy, perfect stone. Jack tried to estimate the cost and time involved in cleaning and repairing those walls and roofs and failed utterly.
From the centre tower a great black flag stirred and lighter pennants fluttered, red and blue and gold, around it. The encircling moat, full of water, was home to perhaps a dozen swans gliding in pristine white formation past the drawbridge. Which was raised.
‘She invited me, Altair,’ Jack observed. The big black gelding flicked one ear and then cocked a hoof comfortably, settling down to wait. ‘The least she could do is lower the drawbridge. Perhaps I am supposed to send a page over in a rowing boat or have a herald trumpet my arrival. What is the etiquette for calling on people deluded enough to live in the Middle Ages?’
He gathered up the reins and sent the horse on at a walk down the slope towards the fairy-tale building. When they were halfway there the drawbridge began to creak slowly downwards until it reached his side of the moat with a dull thud. Someone was watching.
‘Which leaves me faced with a portcullis,’ Jack muttered. ‘What is the matter with the woman? Her father was the lunatic who wanted to play knights in armour and he’s been dead for almost a year.’ Hence,
