This book was first published in 1979 by Robert Hale Ltd. in London. It was then called Dangerous Masquerade but when I got back the author rights and republished on Kindle I changed the title to avoid confusion with my Regency Masquerade series.

Although I write Regencies, this one takes place in what is actually my favourite historical period. Why? Well mostly, I’m afraid, because I just love the clothes. And also, it seems to me to be the last truly romantic age. The Regency, although it is the setting for so much romance is not really all that romantic. In fact it is the beginning of the modern age. As Henry Tilney says in Northanger Abbey: Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?

Well I suppose Henry is right about the Regency but in 1745 there were still pirates, highwaymen, escaped Jacobites and Bonnie Prince Charlie hiding in the heather. Men wore velvet and ruffles, ladies wore panniered gowns and patches. Swashes were buckled and villains were run-through. I know that in reality the Georgian world was dirty, smelly and gin-sodden but if I was going to write about reality I wouldn’t be writing romance at all now would I?