This story is set during the outwardly charming and refined Regency in a small town in Sussex. It is a glorious summer of blazing sun and dazzling skies with the scent of roses wafting across well-tended gardens but, beneath this gentle veneer, passions rage and all is not quite as it seems. Euphemia, having reluctantly accepted an invitation to dinner, meets two people who overturn her quiet life. The first knows her secret, the second bears a name which causes her to faint even before dinner is served. She thinks she is the only one who is concealing something; she is not. Danger mounts until one afternoon, in grave peril, she discovers not only what really happened seven years ago but a good deal more besides. Written in an old-fashioned, sophisticated style lightly seasoned with ironic wit, this is a book which recreates its period whilst at the same time depicting the unchanging nature of human emotion. People, as always, behave in the way that Society demands but, beneath the carapace of early 19th century manners, they feel no differently to the way people do today.
About the Author: Catherine Bowness has only begun to write novels since she retired. Partly, this was lack of time; mainly, it was lack of confidence. Now, living in the country with several cats and two dogs, she is able to indulge herself. She says she writes escapist novels because that's what she wants to read and there never seem to be enough of them. Her parents lived abroad and she went to boarding school. She spent the holidays with her Victorian grandmother and thinks that she would have been a different person - and might write different books - if she had not been alone so much during her childhood. She passed the time reading 19th century and early 20th century novels and suspects this may be the reason why she writes in the way she does. She is a counsellor and hypnotherapist. It was when she began writing scripts for her hypnotherapy training that she realised how powerful and soothing escapism can be and how images, led by the hypnotherapist but conjured by the client, can open the mind and soothe the soul. It was this, and the joy she felt when writing them, that inspired her finally to start writing the novels she had wanted to since early childhood. Practising hypnotherapy gave her the courage to share her writing with others. She is enjoying her new career.