Step Into The Story

Lovely news just as I am packing my bags for the Isle of Mull... The Heart of Christmas has hit the USA Today Bestseller List at #94! This anthology is a threesome (!) with a story from the incomparable Mary Balogh and a debut novella from Courtney Milan as well as my own story A Season for Suitors , which features characters from The Earl's Prize and Wayward Widow. Thank you to all those wonderful people who purchased a copy - and so early for Christmas too! I really appreciate your support.

I'm taking a break for a few weeks and my blog is too, so before I go I thought I would post a round up of what has been a very busy and exciting few months! The Brides of Fortune books are still on sale in the US and Kidnapped , my homage to Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel, is in the UK shops. Also on sale in the UK is Loves Me, Loves Me Not , the Romantic Novelists' Association 50th anniversary anthology to which I was very proud to have contributed a Regency novella called " The Elopement ." LMLMN is a big fat romantic treat of a book with stories to suit all tastes and genres. I'm reading it myself at the moment and am loving all the stories! In terms of new releases I have novellas in two Christmas anthologies currently on sale: The Heart of Christmas with Mary Balogh and Courtney Milan, and Together By Christmas with Catherine George and Louise Allen. Yes, it is ridiculously early to be thinking of Christmas, isn't it! But evidently not if...

Today I went to Wantage to do some research for my current manuscript. The book is set in 1813 and has as its hero an Irish soldier of fortune held in England as a prisoner during the Napoleonic Wars. The story of the French prisoners of war in England has fascinated me since I came across a footnote about them in a book about the Battle of Trafalgar. I hadn't really thought about the fate of prisoners of war in that era; I didn't even know that there were any, let alone that they were shipped to Britain and held in some cases for the duration of the conflict. The rank and file were incarcerated in prison hulks moored in places like Chatham, or locked up in what we would now call maximum security jails. Dartmoor Prison was built specifically to house French POWs in the Napoleonic Wars. At the height of the war there were a staggering 60 000 French prisoners in Britain and several thousand officers. This seems like a huge number of enemy prisoners in the country and it is no wo...

This is the Craven State Carriage, a Victorian coach said to rival in magnificence Queen Victoria's royal carriage (she would not have been amused)! It is part of the carriage collection at Arlington Court, a National Trust property in Devon where you can not only go to view some wonderful horse-drawn coaches but you can try your hand at driving one as well. A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to go to an illustrated talk about the history of carriages, given by Colin Henderson, who had been the Queen's Head Coachman. Not only did he have some wonderful anecdotes about the Golden Jubilee but he had also worked as a riding specialist and stuntman on a number of films and included the role of highwayman on his CV! He gave us a brisk trot through the early history and background of carriages - the word coach, for instance, comes from the Hungarian Kote - but it was when we got onto the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that my note-taking went into overdrive beca...